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Fitting In, the charming sophomore album from folk-bluegrass singer-songwriter Ross Thorn, opens with the catchy folk number “Baby, That’s All I Need.” Thorn’s banjo lurks smiling in the background. But he subtly undercuts the song’s upbeat groove and its friendly imagery drawn from nature: “We’re all the same, just different faces” – but “Only time will tell, until then I wish you well.” Life is always uncertain.
Bluegrass is an important vibe on the album, as in the cheeky instrumental “First Class Clown Wagon,” and in “Far Away,” which features the Spine Stealers (Kate Ruland and Emma O’Shea) on gripping, high-lonesome vocals. The quaver in these lead vocals is devastating, a little like Patty Griffin’s, but the song leavens the sadness with pretty, wordless harmonies.
Gospel-style harmonies and an ur-melody from the banjo drive “Mariner’s Lament.” Finger-picked guitar is the only accompaniment on another sort of lament, the homespun “A Midwestern Goodbye,” perhaps the album’s most luminous song. Vocally and melodically it feels like a lost Townes Van Zandt track, and Thorn’s tongue-in-cheekiness lightens up the lyrics: “Did you hear, she up and left me, like some old country song. Don’t have a dog or truck, but if I did they’d be gone.”
On “What’s Up With You,” accordion and violin hum in the background while finger-picked guitar drives the tune. The lyrics include the old trope “It’s another day in paradise” sung with evident irony. “I’m a little messed up, but I’m OK too” seems to be the best we can hope for. The upbeat “Pick-A-Dee-Day” calls out life’s ubiquitous losses and disappointments more energetically.
Banjo and fiddle figure at the forefront of the arrangements, with those instruments called out in the breezy “I Lost My Voice and My Accordion But I Still Know How to Polka” – actually a polka. An electric guitar takes a solo in the Western swing of “Internet Blues,” where Thorn also breaks out his yodel. Fuzzed-out guitar tenses up the coda of the extended title track, with Thorn plaintively declaring, “I love you so.”
“I really should go, get up, get gone,” Thorn sings in “A Midwestern Goodbye.” Maybe, but with his fresh, economical, dusty-poetic lyrics and honest, skilled songwriting, he’ll be welcome back anytime.
