We can glean at least two insights from the release of the third Flatlanders album of the millennium, following a hiatus of three decades. First, the Texas trio of buddies since boyhood has renewed its commitment to becoming more a band than a legend. Second, there is such a thing as quintessential Flatlanders music that is distinct from the music of Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
The second is particularly crucial, for 2004’s Wheels Of Fortune, the last Flatlanders album before this, reverted more to the song-swap ethos that has informed the solo careers of the three, as they’ve treated any of the songs of each other as their own. This one is more like 2002’s Now Again, a truly collaborative project. This time through, the production (and steel guitar) of Lloyd Maines and the cantina accordion of Joel Guzman help to reinforce the common bond among three musical spirits both kindred and disparate.
If Bette Midler hadn’t long ago claimed the title Songs For The New Depression, it would have been perfect for this song cycle of broken dreams, heartsick vagabonds and populist resilience – songs that are steeped in the spirit of Woody Guthrie yet are as timely as tomorrow’s foreclosure. In the opening “Homeland Refugee”, Ely invokes a classic Guthrie reference, as “the pastures of plenty are burning by the sea,” and this won’t be the last time here we’ll see the American dream turn apocalyptic.
Yet this is no more (and no less) an inherently political album than an inherently metaphysical one, with love songs that also obey no borders and find no home. “Cry For Freedom” and “Just About Time” already sound like Flatlanders signature songs, written and sung by the three, filled with that typically organic west Texan wordplay – “Everybody’s saying it’s just about time/But it’s partly about space” – and featuring the obligatory return of Steve Wesson’s saw.
Where such highlights have more of an epic scope, “Free The Wind” and Ely’s closing “There’s Never Been” are more like secular hymns, with the spiritual delicacy of haiku. And the Gilmore-sung “No Way I’ll Never Need You” turns a double-negative into a west Texas Zen koan: “I can think of several ways I’ll never get to heaven, and there’s bound to me some more I never knew/But there’s no two ways about it, I’ll never need another, for there’s no way I’ll never need you.”
Hancock invokes the Book of Revelation in “Wishing For A Rainbow”, and Gilmore warns “Where you gonna run when the world’s on fire” in his adaptation of Woody Guthrie’s “Sowing On The Mountain” (with guest fiddle from the Dixie Chicks’ Martie Maguire, bandmate of the producer’s daughter Natalie Maines). Amid all this creative fire, only Hancock’s “Thank God For The Road” sounds like a retread, a road he’s traveled many times before. Providing some fresh juice is Gilmore’s son Colin, whose “The Way We Are”, sung by his dad, is the most uptempo number amid ballads with more acoustic arrangements.
Third time’s the charm for the Hill Country Flatlanders, as they’ve occasionally threatened to bill themselves since forsaking the flatlands of Lubbock for the Texas Hill Country outside Austin. This release finally convinces that the whole is more than the sum of its considerable parts, even as it puts new music individually from Ely, Hancock and Gilmore on the back burner.
