The work of Bruce Henderson, a roots-rock veteran who got his start with the bands Hearts & Minds and High Plains Drifters, comes complete with a recommendation from filmmaker Robert Altman. Offering what seems like an out-of-place endorsement — imagine Guy Clark giving a big thumbs-up to Cookie’s Fortune — Altman has referred to Henderson as “pound for pound, the best songwriter since Jimmy Webb and Lyle Lovett.”
Then again, the songs on this second solo release from the Oklahoma-born, NYC-based Henderson do have a movie-scene quality, with his tales logging a lot of time in the land of metaphor and honeys. Henderson’s compositions tend to be built around time-proven images (“And I’m bone tired, shot to hell/Don’t drop your bucket down in this well/It done run dry,” he warns on the big-beat “Bone Tired”) as well as musty comparisons given new twists (“If wishes were wheels/Beggars would ride/In Lincolns and Buicks/With leather inside,” he suggests in “I Wanted To”). But he also has some unprecedented stuff, such as the extended metaphor of “I Never Lost An Arm”, which captures with sledgehammer directness the pain, phantom or otherwise, of running into a former lover ten years down the road.
Providing the soundtrack for these vignettes and flashbacks is lean rock with plenty of rootsy shadings — an accordion and fiddle here, a lap steel and a mandolin there. When everything comes together, such as on “Speed Rack” (covered by kindred spirits the Hangdogs on last year’s East Of Yesterday) and an unflinching first-person account of an attempted robbery’s fatal outcome titled “Look At You Now”, Henderson commands your attention. Just ask Robert Altman.
