Grayson Capps is a songwriter who confronts and seduces listeners with his lyrics. While he observes closely, he's far from neutral. He is always 100-percent invested in his encounters with people, nature, and life experiences, and gives them the same weight as he sends them out as poetic grist from the mill with a canny use of metaphor that relies only on homespun plainspeak to impart what he's learned. He can be confessional, empowering, devastatingly intuitive, wryly humorous, intimate, and angry. His tomes reflect multi-dimensional spiritual and carnal truths in the fabric of everyday life. He adorns them in gritty blues, swampy folk, back porch country, Cajun, and funky roots rock from the fecund soil of his Gulf Coast.
For a little more than two decades,
Capps' has had Grammy- winning producer and engineer
Trina Shoemaker as his life partner. She didn't intend to produce him but it happened eventually. She's also his witness. Her role on
South Front Street: A Retrospective 1997-2019 is integral. Begun as a personal playlist, it doesn't follow a standard "best-of" trajectory. Her sequencing of these tracks instead reflects "â?¦songs that paint a picture of our life together and reveal a world from the uniquely enchanted, poetic and tormented perspective of
Grayson Capps." She remixed a number of tracks to make them fit the mix of the earlier material that she hadn't worked on to create a single listening experience. The older songs include three from his band
Stavin' Chain. Its bookends are the poetically tender Americana opener "Get Back Up" and the heartbreaking narrative "Harley Davidson." In between lies the lusty swinging barroom blues of "Train Song." "May We Love," from 2015's criminally undernoticed
Love Songs, Mermaids and Grappa, is haunted; it's a slow apocalyptic gospel exhortation to surrender to the power of love itself; during this precarious era, our survival demands it. The storyteller emerges again on "Junior & The Old African Queen" from 2007's
Songbones, a jazz-inflected acoustic narrative with gypsy violins and lonesome harmonica. "A Love Song for Bobby Long" is the title song to
Shainee Gabrel's 2004 film of the same name adapted from the novel Off Magazine Street penned by his dad,
Ronald Everett Capps, starring
Scarlett Johansson and
John Travolta. More recent material includes "Psychic Channel Blues," a laconic, humorous, easy grooving, and raw backroom strut. "Rock "N Roll," from
the Lost Cause Minstrels, is one of
Capps' finest songs. Its stark, powerful narrative is couched in shuffling snares, sparse, distorted slide guitar, and
Capps' trademark gravelly voice. It comes from the murky ether and looks squarely into the foreboding darkness without flinching. As evidenced on
South Front Street,
Shoemaker shows
Capps' wide-open, generous heart. It imparts wisdom from life's hard knocks and its sometimes-questionable blessings with equanimity. In many ways, this doesn't remotely feel like a retrospective, but a new album. Given his lyric gifts and roots forms of musical expression, these songs haven't dated an iota: they're timeless. ~ Thom Jurek
