A few years ago, I ran into Scott Link, then the leader of the alt-country band Diesel Doug and the Long Haul Trackers, in a Portland bar. Link’s often-turbulent love life had just undergone another upheaval.
“Did you dump her,” I asked, “or did she dump you?”
“I dumped her,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said, “because the songs are better the other way.”
“When the songs get written,” he said, “they’ll be the other way.”
That comment didn’t bother me at the time – being well past my first drink of the evening – and I soon forgot about it. But I was reminded of that incident when I picked up a copy of Link’s first solo album, “Coming Around.” And it made me a little uneasy. In fact, it made me a lot uneasy.
Just how dishonest was this disc going to be?
I didn’t know if “Coming Around” contained any emotionally reversed songs from Link’s past, but if it did, I was put off by the possibility I was about to listen to him exploiting someone else’s heartache – heartache he may have inflicted.
I’m not one of those weirdos who demands notarized affidavits be included in all CD liner notes, asserting the literal truth of every emotional lurch between the chords. I don’t get songwriting mixed up with journalism. I’m well aware of the unfair criticism aimed at the likes of Lucinda Williams and others for taking artistic liberties with real life in their lyrics. In the best songs, the stories aren’t always accurate representations of what happened, but they ought to contain the unembellished lessons learned. A good songwriter synthesizes not only what’s happened to him, but also what’s happened to everyone around him and turns it into something that, regardless of how real it might be, is undeniably true.
I believe all that. But I was still bothered.
It’s not that I think Link is an insensitive clod. Anybody who could write such Long Haul Truckers classics as “Not Much To Say” and “Never Lookin’ Down” knows what it feels like to get inside someone else’s skin. But this is also the guy who sang “If I’d Shot Her When I Met Her (I’d Be Outta Jail By Now).”
I was somewhat comforted by the opening track, “End to End,” a bar-hopping blast in the Diesel Doug tradition, distanced from those days only by tighter playing and better lyrics. “If you didn’t know her then, you’d just never know,” Link wails. “Because it’s hard to see her wounds in the blue edge of night.”
Explosive, without being exploitive. So far, so good.
It wasn’t until I got to the title track that my fears returned. “There’s a tale inside each one of us,” Link sings. “A simple truth that’s never told.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to listen to it being told, in case that simple truth belonged to somebody else. But I kept listening, and by the time I came to the end of that track – “But to the heart I’ve not been bound, but I’m coming around” – my discomfort had eased. Link understands a few things, besides how to appropriate somebody else’s emotions. He’s singing to us from someplace deep inside.
That might sound more touchie-feelie than anything on “Coming Around” actually is. The erstwhile Diesel Doug hasn’t gone soft. If you’re a Long Haul Truckers fan, you won’t be disappointed with this CD, even though there’s nothing as raucous as “I’d Like To Quit Drinkin’ (But I Live Over A Bar).” Link is a little older, a little more mature, a little more willing to, as his MySpace page puts it, “let us inside that formerly manufactured Diesel Doug persona.” That doesn’t mean he isn’t still hitting the honky tonks (“And tears can look like sweat under neon light”) and hitting the road (“I’m chasing a ghost that I never knew”). This is still hard-edged country music by way of Earle (Steve) and Merle (Haggard). What it now contains is a fresh self-awareness that makes the music more believable than it ever was when he was singing about “18 Wheels of Love.”
In real life, Link isn’t a truck driver. He’s a real estate agent. But I doubt he’d ever get a gig as Deductible Doug and The Long Term Investments. And even if he did, I doubt you’d go see that band, no matter how honest they were about fixed-rate versus adjustable-rate mortgages.
What’s real here is the poetry, and what’s right here is the way it fits with the music, whether it’s in a gutsy duet with Darien Brahms on Link’s “Almost Always” (“I almost found a way to give up the fight/Almost believed my own lie”) or Joe Jackson’s “I’m The Man,” a ripping reminder of all that hasn’t changed in the world of pop culture. Makes me wish the next album could be all Darien duets and ’80s covers.
They could do Dolly and Porter. And the Eurythmics.
Not everything on this disc represents much of an advance over the average Diesel Doug cut. Songs like “I’ve Got You On My Mind” and “Night Turns Blue” might have filled out any Long Haul Truckers’ album, although critics would have noticed that the musicianship had jumped a few notches and the lead singer was consistently on key. “Picture Of You” is a re-do of an actual Diesel tune from one of the “Greetings From Area Code 207” compilations of a few years ago (it also turns up on the excellent Truckers retrospective “Mistakes Were Made”). Link has tried “Circles” twice before – once singing alone and again with Jenny Jumpstart – with excellent results. This latest version is saved from redundancy only by Matthew Robbins’ haunting “Ghost Riders In The Sky”-like electric guitar solo.
In general, though, “Coming Around” takes more chances than I’d expected and succeeds more often than I would have believed possible.
And if it appropriates somebody else’s emotions along the way, that person should be happy they’re so honestly presented.
[[tagline]] Scott Link’s “Coming Around” on Sad Bird Records is available at some area music stores (although, it took me a couple of tries to find it). For more information try www.scottlink.net (which doesn’t seem to be operating yet) or www.myspace.com/scottlink. Al Diamon is easier to reach. Just e-mail aldiamon@herniahill.net.
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