Apparently Tim Carroll’s most recent album, The Devil Is A Busy Man, came out about a year ago, at least according to his MySpace page, but it’s only on my shelf because his wife, the gifted singer Elizabeth Cook, sent it to me during the dark and quiet days of this last summer when I quit opening mail and listening to music, except by accident. And, anyway, it has a 2008 copyright date on it, and I don’t care.
See, Tim Carroll is why everybody who loves music should move to Nashville for a few years and spend as many nights as possible out in the clubs, just listening. Not the clubs where the songwriters try to get deals, but the clubs where the songwriters who will never get deals congregate. Carroll is a member of that tribe of extraordinarily gifted players and writers who show up in constantly changing configurations throughout Music City’s bars, playing to twenty or forty or maybe even a hundred listeners who may or may not have a clue who they’re seeing, nor, even, how good they are.
Tim Carroll, with his wife Elizabeth Cook at Nashville’s Station Inn.
If he lived in your town, he’d be the guy everybody wanted to play with. He’s kind of that guy in Nashville, last I was there, and in good company.
He’s been close, Tim has. Cover of Billboard, once. A deal with Sire, only Sire was sorta dysfunctional at just that moment and never put out his album. (He did, under the name Not For Sale, just in case. He has that kind of wise-ass sense of humor that’s usually endearing, especially if you see his crooked, late-breaking smile. Even if you’re the one being skewered.) Close, with a couple songs on movie soundtracks, bits of mailbox money arriving from other songs that people like John Prine and Robbie Fulks and Kasey Chambers have cut.
And he’s rocked, in New York City with the Blue Chieftains back before we even called it alt-country. He co-wrote “Why Do I Need A Job?” with Bobby Bare Jr., and “A Girl That’s Hip” with Duane Jarvis. All that stuff.
Thing is, Nashville is full of guys and gals like Tim Carroll, and it can break your heart, being that close and not ever getting more than a cup of coffee from the big leagues. And it can break your spirit.
On the other hand, it beats a real job, and probably playing music right now is a more stable career than the Wall Street gig he held onto for eight years. (Go figure.)
So I’m sitting here with The Devil Is A Busy Man crunching away on the headphones and a stack of Carroll’s other mostly self-released and abjectly packaged output from the last decade on the desk. And it swings and it rocks and just as I type this he’s singing: “I count my blessings dear/I’m so glad to be here/I should for heaven’s sake/It’s icing on the cake.”
And even though this isn’t entirely what the song about, it’s also sorta the point: He keeps making these records. He doesn’t stop. Tim and I, we graduated from different high schools in different states but in the same year, and so as my knees creak and life adds its own curious complications and the news keeps arguing that I really need a tinfoil hat to get through the next day, I have increasing respect for those among us who do not stop. Who do not relent. Who do not let go of their dreams, of their ambitions, of their talents.
Beyond that, I like his songs. I like the fact that Tim has an effortless garage-rock swagger (there’s a reason he can write with Bare Jr.) that cranks up on songs like “The Guy For The Job”; and, at the same time, he plays and writes with a goofy, jaunty small-town joy that emerges on the one-stop-light police-trap gem “Elmwood”, an almost novelty song with Miss Elizabeth hicking it up in the background. Or the rambunctious “So Stupid It’s Cool”, which somehow balances out the almost tender sentiments of “No Escape From Love”.
In the end, it matters not the slightest when this album came out, and when I play it ten years hence, I won’t hear a trace of the moment in which it was recorded. It’ll just be another terrific album from Tim Carroll, and it’ll make me smile. It’ll help me to remember fondly my days in Nashville, my time on the edge of the music industry, and why I should apologize for none of it.
