Almost 50 years after his debut album, Ry Cooder produced one other basic with The Prodigal Son, blended and mastered by Martin Pradler, who labored with Cooder on his earlier album, 2012’s Election Particular. On The Prodigal Son, launched on Fantasy Information on Could 11, 2018, the 71-year-old performs the guitar, bass, and mandolin together with his regular distinctive contact and panache – “It only took six decades of trying to get good at this,” he joked on the time – and wrote new compositions and chosen outdated songs that sounded recent and related.
Take heed to The Prodigal Son.
The album’s 11 tracks embrace three Cooder originals and a rigorously curated number of blues, gospel, and bluegrass from the early a long time of the twentieth century.
The guitar maestro has at all times had an in depth affinity with the music of Blind Willie Johnson, the Texas blues musician who died in 1945; Cooder recorded a seminal model of the hymn-like “Dark Was The Night, Cold was the Ground” again in 1973. On this, his seventeenth solo album, he brings to life two different songs from a pioneering musician he has described as “just so good that I think the guy is one of these interplanetary world musicians.”
On The Prodigal Son, Cooder covers one other of Johnson’s “great songs,” the pertinent social commentary “Everybody Ought to Treat A Stranger Right,” which showcases his guitar abilities, with Terry Evans, Arnold McCuller, and Bobby King offering neat backing vocals.
For one more Johnson 20s basic, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” Cooder’s son, co-producer Joachim Cooder, brings a brooding high quality to his percussion work that fantastically underscores some extra deft guitar work and Cooder senior’s plaintive singing. He additionally attracts from a Texan effectively for the track “Straight Street,” which was recorded by the gospel group The Pilgrim Vacationers in 1955.
Faith runs by the album, from the biblical parable that impressed the normal title track, to the core of non secular tracks which might be a pivotal theme on The Prodigal Son and which supply an unflinching have a look at fashionable America by the prism of morality.
Cooder has stated that every one the totally different sorts of music he performs are “the same stuff – good time music,” and that is actually true of his model of Blind Roosevelt Graves’ 1936 non secular “I’ll Be Rested When The Roll Is Called,” which is essentially the most musically upbeat of the album’s 11 songs. The spiritual theme continues with a respectful model of Carter Stanley’s “Harbor Of Love.”
Maybe the spotlight of the non secular songs is “You Must Unload,” which was written by Blind Alfred Reed, a bluesman found by Ralph Peer, who recorded Reed, together with The Carter Household and Jimmie Rodgers, on the well-known 1927 Bristol Classes.
Reed’s songwriting is remarkably potent (he wrote the usual “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?,” which has been a Cooder staple for many years), and this track, from these celebrated 1927 periods, is given a masterful makeover by Cooder. He’s helped by some very good musicianship on the monitor, from the bass enjoying of Robert Francis to some angelic violin enjoying from Aubrey Haynie. The lyrics, a warning that greed just isn’t the trail to Heaven, was written by a forgotten craftsman of track, who died of hunger in 1956.
Cooder’s personal work has at all times been political, and his anger concerning the selfishness and small-mindedness of the fashionable world comes by loud and clear within the trio of songs he wrote and co-wrote for the album. “Shrinking Man” is a plea for decency as Cooder sings “Look as good as you can, but please don’t rob your fellow man” towards a bluesy shuffle rhythm. In his liner notes, the California-born musician says: “I do connect the political/economic dimensions with the inner life of people, since people are at risk and oppressed on all sides in our world today.”
“Gentrification,” co-written together with his son, is one other track about inequality (it contains references to Johnny Depp and Google), with a breezy melody that contrasts with the darkish lyrics. However the bleakest of Cooder’s trio is “Jesus And Woody,” which namechecks basic Woody Guthrie songs equivalent to “Vigilante Man” and “This Land is Your Land.” Guthrie was a songwriter that Cooder first imitated when he was solely 4 years outdated, and this track casts a chilly eye on what the world does to idealists: “Now they’re starting up their engine of hate/Don’t it make you feel lonesome and blue?/Yes, I was a dreamer, Mr. Guthrie, and you were a dreamer too.”
Composer William L Dawson, who died of pneumonia in 1990, on the age of 90, was head of the Tuskegee Institute Choir for 25 years and acclaimed for his choral preparations of African-American folks songs. Cooder delivers an exquisite model of his track “In His Care.”
Dawson stated late in life, “I have never doubted the possibilities of music,” and The Prodigal Son reaffirms that message of hope, regardless of its darkness. It’s classic Cooder, stuffed with spirit and humanity.
The Prodigal Son may be purchased right here.
