Music Review: Grayson Capps - Songbones - Page 2

Those of you familiar with Grayson's work with his band the Stumpknockers will have heard some of the songs on Songbones performed with a full band before as this is something he recorded almost on the spur of the moment back in 2002. He and Tom Marron, who accompanies him on violin and harmonica, had gone over to Mike West's studio/home after a gig and decided to keep playing. They sat down in front of some microphones and over the course of the next five hours recorded the bare bones versions of the songs you hear on this disc. (As Grayson puts it in his liner notes they are in their most naked form: Songbones)

I've been struggling for a couple of days trying to figure out how to best describe the experience of listening to Grayson Capps for the first time. I could say it was like listening to so and so the first time as a means of describing the enormity of his impact, but that would also imply a similarity of style or material that isn't valid no matter who was used as the basis of comparison. Certainly he has attributes in common with people like John Prine, Steve Goodman, Woody and Arlo Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, in terms of the integrity of his music and his ability to communicate emotions honestly, but he brings something to his songs that's different from anything I've heard from anyone else.

There's the sense that he has an understanding of individuals and their feelings in a way that perhaps only Woody Guthrie approached with his songs about the dirt poor farmers in the depression or that John Prine brings to some of his material. Yet there is something about Grayson Capps's approach to his subject matter that is different from any of the others. While they are telling people's stories, you get the feeling that Grayson might actually have lived what he sings about.

Whether he did or not is not the point, anyway he'd be long dead by now if he had. What is important is that he seems to have the uncanny ability to see the world through the eyes of the people who populate his songs. Perhaps it's because in each of his songs he is able to bring the world his people exist in to life around them, thus allowing us to experience a small piece of their reality. His ability to create an atmosphere where we can empathize with the character the song is about, no matter who or what they are is something that I don't think I've experienced to the same extent before in the work of any songwriter.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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