Rod Picott, currently touring the UK in advance of this album’s release, follows on from the superb Paper Hearts & Broken Arrows with the equally superb Starlight Tour. For anyone familiar with Picott there’s little here that is new or innovative and that’s not a bad thing. Indeed, the old idiom if it ain’t broke don’t fix it certainly applies here as Picott has steadily released a series of albums which have met much acclaim while he remains a huge favourite on the UK touring circuit.
Starlight Tour finds Picott once again in the company of producer Neilson Hubbard who also drums while Lex Price on bass and Juan Solorzano on guitars, keyboards and trumpet complete the band set up. They can whip up a fine rocking sound as on the driving diatribe against the opiate epidemic scourging the States which is Wasteland or delve into junkyard blues on the pulverising Digging Ditches but for the most part the band are more restrained, allowing Picott to play to his strengths – the raw emotional impact he carries when he strips his songs back to the bone. He goes straight for that emotional jugular on several songs here with Television Preacher a pitch perfect capture of a dirt poor family sending their money to a televangelist while the title song finds Picott at his best, finding poetry amidst misery and cruel fate.
A songwriter who has turned his hand to writing novels and short stories, Picott is a supreme chronicler of the loss of the American dream. Homecoming Queen (co-written with Amy Speace) tells the tale of a small town girl, once feted, now faded, while Pelican Bay finds an army veteran recalling the love of his life and their resultant daughter as he wanders lonesome on a beach, scratching his wife’s name in the sand and watching the ocean wash her away.
The band feature heavily on the opening song Next Man In Line, adding a fine muscular tension on this ode to Picott’s ailing father which contrasts his prime moments with his latter decline and ponders on his bloodline. At the other end of the album Time To Let Go Of Your Dreams finds Picott in an elegiac mood, not raging at the dying of the light, instead, proposing an acceptance of the inevitable, a good life followed by a good and peaceful death. It’s a wonderful song, tender and moving, a perfect close to a powerful and moving album.