Kate Campbell often writes songs that read like short stories, and on Save The Day she acknowledges in the liner notes the literary inspirations for this new collection of story-songs, listing Frederic Buechner, Langston Hughes, Harper Lee and others. Where this set of tunes intersects with those authors’ work is in the assimilation of the spiritual into the everyday, something that Hughes’ or Lee’s characters would understand implicitly.
Campbell uses her well-established cast of Muscle Shoals musical characters (keyboardist Spooner Oldham among them) to place her stories in a bed of gospel, soul and blues on songs such as “Shining Like The Sun”. Matters of faith come to the forefront in “Falling Out Of Heaven” and “Looking For Jesus”, the latter featuring a guest vocal from John Prine.
The spiritual aspects of her songwriting are just below the surface on the title track and “Dark Night Of The Soul”, which are sort of opposite sides to the same story of people just trying to make it through another day, or another night. “Sorrowfree” sums up the desired end result upon one’s passing that “There all will be forgiven in a land called Sorrowfree.”
