|
| |
Jay Boy Adams - The Shoe Box
- Thirty years after his last two records were released, Jay Boy Adams drops The Shoe Box. Adams produced this coalition of blues, country, bluegrass and rock. He sings about occurrences in his life and the down-home feeling resonates throughout the whole album.
The title track has Adams singing about a time capsule he found that has transported him back to the good old days. There is steady acoustic guitar play from Adams, Brian McRae and Gary Birdwell. There is also drum work from McRae, but it doesn’t overpower. Meanwhile, the mandolin work from Marty Stuart breaks things up a tad, as does the percussion play from Monty Byrom. Adams takes listeners back to his earlier years with lines like, “I opened an old shoe box that I found in a corner of an old dark closet. A box of treasures, I thought I’d lost it. There was a stack of pictures of my high school buddies, no wrinkles and no gray. Welcome to the good old days. Oh how the time does fly, flashes in front of your eyes. It’s done with a snap of your thumb.” This is a song one can listen to while they are foraging through old keepsakes they thought were missing, while hoping to catch an iota of the past.
“Life In A Small Town” paints a sullen portrait of a boy whose life was overturned by a malicious twist of fate, with lines such as, “Billy Don was a good boy, he worked hard in school. He went to church on Sunday, played by all the rules. His mother was a teacher and his daddy played scratch golf…They lived a normal life in a small town. One day when Billy got up he found his daddy lyin’ dead…That’s the day the trouble started. His life would forever change…His life fell apart in a small town.” The slide guitar work from Adams and Lee Roy Parnell really brings that small town vibe to the song. One cannot help but feel for the subject, and the slightly depressed timbre in Adams's voice shows he feels remorse.
On “Color You Gone,” there is electric guitar play from Adams, Byrom and McRae, which adds an edge to this song. In addition, the drum play from McRae is firmer and Adams's guitar work is aided with help from a resonator, which makes the sound different than the previous tracks. Adams emotes about how straightforward things used to be and how back then the choices made were self-explanatory, with lines like, “It used to be so easy knowin’ right from wrong. It used to be so simple, everything was black and white…If the grass is greener on the other side, why do I feel so blue? I color you gone, long gone.” It seems Adams is yearning for a time when life was trouble-free and decisions were uncomplicated.
Jay Boy Adams’s The Shoe Box is a peek inside life in a rural America. The things that can befall its dwellers and how they cope. Adams’s voice echoes the strain some of these happenings have taken, but hidden behind that is a hope that things will look brighter soon.
Reviewer: Sari N. Kent
new
Reviewer's Rating: 8.5
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
Added: 29-Apr-2007
Talk to other readers about this story.
|
|
|
|
|
