There are country performers who take pains to maintain an ironic detachment from their material; no matter how emotionally riven a song’s character may be, he’s still an actor fretting on the stage of the singer’s imagination. “Hey,” the musician seems to be acknowledging with a wink between verses, “It’s only a song.”
James Hand ain’t one of those guys.
A 54-year-old “overnight” sensation in the bars and dancehalls around Austin, Hand hooked up with the unusual tag-team pairing of Asleep At The Wheel’s Ray Benson and steel guitarist Lloyd Maines to produce his first album for a large label. Both of those guys know their way around a hardwood dancefloor, and in Hand they have found not only a singer who harkens back to the ’50s-era honky-tonk glory days of Ray Price, Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb and, yep, Hank Williams, but a songwriter whose lyrics seem less composed than torn loose from some inner scar tissue.
“I guess I’ve just been a haunted bastard my whole life,” Hand told an Austin reporter, and when you hear him sing a mournful tale such as “I’ve Got A Lot Of Hiding Left To Do”, “If I Live Long Enough To Heal”, or the self-explanatory “Leave The Lonely Alone”, you believe it.
Like Willie Nelson (with whom he shares roots in Central Texas’ blackland prairie country), Hand conveys an intimacy and believability that makes even lighthearted two-step trifles such as “Baby, Baby Don’t Tell Me That” and “Little Bitty Slip” seem like secrets whispered in confessional. But the most remarkable track here is “Shadows Where The Magic Was”, the tale of a bereft husband and father who burns down his ex’s house around him. The song’s images — a cap to a whiskey bottle spinning across the room, the flames licking up around him as he stares into the devil’s eyes — are almost intolerably vivid.
Ironic detachment, whatever its merits, doesn’t render music like that. Hand gets to the heart of his songs the old fashioned way — by living them — and we the audience are the richer for it.
