Welcome back to the CD Odyssey where we just keep sailin’ randomly into whatever album happens to come up next. Today…it’s country!
Disc 1789 is…Shooting Star
Artist: Benjamin Tod
Year of Release: 2024
What’s up with the Cover? This cover is a paradox of old and new. The picture looks old timey, if you overlook that rather prominent neck tattoo that Mr. Tod is sporting.
The music itself matches the style of the photo, but as per that aforementioned neck tattoo Mr.Tod is very much a modern artist.
How I Came To Know It: I read a review on one of my favourite newly discovered music review sites, “Americana Highways”. I find a lot of new and obscure music here and if you like Americana music you should check it out.
After you read my blog first, of course.
How It Stacks Up: While I have plans to check out Benjamin Tod’s earlier albums, for now this is my only one, so it can’t stack up.
Ratings: 4 stars
An average album gets tiresome at about the third listen, but a good one just gets better every time through. It was this latter experience that I had with “Shooting Star” which had me go from hearing it as derivative, to recognizing that it was, in fact, timeless. The separation is subtle but distinct and usually based on one simple thing: quality.
Benjamin Tod is a throwback to a simpler age, peppered with a few modern sensibilities updating old themes of love, heartache, and hard livin’. His nasal delivery and mournful Hank Williams style songwriting. It is so evocative of the elder Hank’s style I was initially suspicious. However, like Hank III and Justin Townes Earle before him, Tod is not stealing a sound – he is injecting it with new energy. “Shooting Star” is a love letter to an earlier simpler time of music, but with its heart planted firmly in the twenty-twenties.
After a round of admission that he’s far from perfect (“I Ain’t The Man”) Tod digs in with some powerful and evocative imagery on the mournful and romantic “Saguaro’s Flower”., a song filled with all kinds of hurt. The chorus grounds the experience:
“So believe me when I say
I miss your love like desert rain
You are a cloud
I'm a saguaro's flower
I'm thirsty as hell
Let your love down”
The image of a flower growing atop a cactus is exactly what this tune calls for, prickly, painful and filled with a frail and desperate beauty.
The other standout on the record is the title track. “Shooting Star” falls into the long tradition of non-commercial musicians taking the boots to Nashville. The song tracks the all-too-common experience of artists going to Nashville only to pour their blood and sweat out for tips on Honky Tonk row. While the bright lights of Nashville draw thousands of hopefuls, for most Tod’s observation of “Nothing can be beautiful when you're trapped inside” is laden with impotent fury.
The fiddle-work on “Shooting Star” strains against itself like the artists trapped inside the web of the city. Setting the imagery early makes the chorus of:
“And the gate is shut up tight
I'm a stick of dynamite
And I've paid every due that's ever come
But I don't kneel for you or anyone”
…doubly powerful. First because you know the gates are keeping the souls of the angry and damned musicians in, not out. Second because Tod turns that experience into a victory through something as simple as refusing to submit. Sometimes just refusing to kneel can be enough.
In his youth, Tod was known to ride the rails and in addition to this giving him true country cred, it also fuels many songs, as he draws on the experience and imagery. In the case of “Mary Could You” he even tells the story of a woman eking out a living stitching up tramps that have gotten beaten or stabbed in the course of their risky adventures.
The record isn’t perfect, and some of the songs just feel old timey without original much to say, but even in those tunes you tend to get a clever turn of phrase or two that makes it all worthwhile.
“Shooting Star” is true to its roots yet willing to flower in unexpected ways if you give it a chance. It definitely has me on the lookout for Tod’s earlier work.
Best tracks: I Ain’t the Man, Saguaros Flower, Mary Could You, Shooting Star, Nothing More
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