CD Odyssey Disc 919: Daniel Romano

After a stressful and frustrating week, I’ve been enjoying a fairly relaxing weekend. There is no Dolphins game this week - we got our losing out of the way earlier than usual during a Thursday night game - but I’m still going to spend the day watching football.

Before I do that, let’s write a music review!

Disc 919 is….Come Cry With Me

Artist: Daniel Romano

Year of Release: 2012

What’s up with the Cover? Everything old is new again, and hip(ster) new bands love evoking the artistic feel of old sixties records. I love it too, and find this album cover both awesome and ironic in equal measure, as I expect Daniel Romano intended.

I suspect the jacket is by famous designer Manuel Cuevas. Sheila and I went to Manuel’s shop in downtown Nashville last year and I could have bought half the store…except that the jackets cost thousands. Maybe one day…

How I Came To Know It: My coworker Sam told me about Daniel Romano and recommended 2011’s “Sleeps Beneath the Willow”. I listened to it and still wasn’t sure, but then I saw this album at a discounted price at the local music store and decided to take a chance. Support your local music stores!

How It Stacks Up:  I have three Daniel Romano albums so far, all bought in the last couple of months. Because they are all new to me, it is hard to stack them up but I’ll take a chance and say “Come Cry With Me” is the best…for now.

Ratings: 4 stars

Sometimes an album is so reminiscent of an earlier era it is hard to tell if it is a clever throwback or a tired derivative.

I wrestled with this question while listening to “Come Cry With Me.” It sounds a great deal like Gram Parsons, from the song construction through the arrangements and even Romano’s vocal style. The more I listened, the more I realized this record is a love letter to that sound, not a rip off. The songs are in the same style but they are thoughtful, creative and original. If you were to mix them into a playlist featuring the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds and Gram Parson’s solo work it could hold its own, which is high praise indeed.

Romano’s voice isn’t the strongest, but he knows how to write songs that stay within his range in a way that you generally don’t notice. In this way he reminds me of John Prine or Steve Earle, both accomplished masters at the same compositional sleight-of-hand.

A lot of the songs speak to heartache and loss, most notably the opening track, “Middle Child” which is a song about a child mourning that his mother never loved him. The echo in the production and the angst in Romano’s voice serve the topics well. Even on “Two Pillow Sleeper” which employs the overused metaphor of the empty pillow, Romano makes it work as he draws you in to country music’s oldest theme: broken hearts.

This sadness is juxtaposed against humour in other tracks. On “Chicken Bill” Romano tells the tale of a drifter getting a temporary job killing chickens on a chicken farm. The song is actually a two-parter, flowing from a Johnny-Cash like bass line on “Chicken Bill” and then flowing into the next track, “When I Was Abroad.” The song is an old country waltz in which Chicken Bill tells how much better his life was when he traveled abroad…or lived as a woman. Probably the former, but I think it is open to interpretation.

A highlight on the album is “I’m Not Crying Over You” where Romano crosses the album’s two themes, telling the story of a heartbroken man who insists he isn’t heartbroken at all, but just practicing for an acting role:

“When she left me, she thought that I was hurting

She heard that I was crying to her friends

But the truth is I just got a new job acting

So any tear that rolls my cheek is just pretend.”

The album ends with a live performance of “A New Love (Can Be Found)” and it is a standout track. Here’s the stark but affecting opening:

“Some stranger is with her for the first time tonight.

What’s a man to do, when he just can’t win?

And all the voices in my head are saying ‘cry your days away’

Why can’t somebody call to me and say:

‘Hey, mister, don’t let it bring you down

A new love can be found

Just open up your eyes

I wasn’t meant to be

No, not this time around.

A new love can be found.’”

The quaver in Romano’s voice is beautiful here, accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. This song is equal parts hope and heartbreak.

I’ll end with a couple of disclaimers. First, “Come Cry With Me” explores a very traditional and old-school country music sound. I happen to love that music, but if you don’t you aren’t going to like this record either.

Second, every Romano album is very different from the others. I just finished listening to his new release “Mosey” for the first time and it is full of horn sections and early disco. Romano does his own thing, and when he does it he delves deeply. You won’t always want to go that far into a single musical idea, and when you don’t he runs the risk of coming off disingenuous. All I can say is, give his records multiple listens because the more times you hear them the more you will notice that he is the real deal: a singer-songwriter that deserves a lot more fame than he’s achieved so far.

Best tracks: Middle Child, Just Between You and Me, I’m Not Crying Over You, A New Love (Can Be Found)