Co-Starring Ray Wylie Hubbard and friends.
Noted previously, a character in a book suggested that “Ray Wylie Hubbard is the greatest living country singer/songwriter.”
In my best thug-life, street voice? “True dat.”
Proto-blog from 25 years back.
That’s just a few days short of the official release date separated by a quarter of a century. New CD, first on major label in a long, long time? Dropped July 10.
I would call Ray Wylie an overnight sensation, but more than three or four decades on this road? Yeah, that’s not overnight. As always there’s that touch of sly, wry — I’d say Scorpio wit — where he makes it seem like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Funny puzzles, amusing wordplay, minor key? He is a master craftsman, at the top of his form, with his long, storied canon behind him, and the new album is stunning.
The David Letterman story is wonderfully telling, the anecdote, apocryphal at best, is that after doing a song on national TV, Letterman asked him to do one more, and then mixed it down. Available on YouTube, &c. — David Letterman stage, Ray Wylie doing “Screw you, we’re from Texas,” which was, is, a national anthem for the ever-rising Texas music scene. A little south of Austin, below the 30th parallel.
A traditional four-four beat, deceptively simple yet thoroughly evocative, with a finely-tuned poet’s ear. “Lean,” “Spartan,” and “Muscular” are terms that come to mind when working through his lyrics, the songs he writes, but there’s also a mystical sense of mirth. Throughout a great number of the Texas Music singer/songwriters, there seems to be a certain kind of engagement with gospel, or even just simple hymns, and Ray Wylie is open about his spiritual connections.
The idea of a hymnal, or a Sunday choir in church, that plays within this music. Shows up in other local artists, thinking REK, Lyle Lovett, &c. Yet, this latest offering from Ray Wylie takes this tone to a new level.
While Ray Wylie is, at best, just another raconteur with a guitar, but then he’s so much more. He defies a single category.
Might’ve inked a deal with the devil at the crossroads, after midnight, but I doubt it.
Co-Starring Ray Wylie Hubbard
The sword is always bloodier than the pen
And everyone one turns a bad trick now and then
Ray Wylie Hubbard, Judy Hubbard
(© Snake Farm Publishing, 2018)
I bought the CD, and wrote a review before the physical CD ever landed in my hands. For starters, most of the music was released as YouTube video versions, and that answered much of the questions. Then, too, most of the Ray Wylie “records” in the last dozen years have been self-published, and that’s always more gratifying to buy from the artist him or her self.
This was a major label release with a long run-up to the release itself. Teased over a period of months, almost years, and then? To see images of Ray Wylie sitting down to sign the CD covers, made it worth the wait.
Think I figured out part of his magic. It isn’t that Ray Wylie “gets it,” whatever “it” is, it’s that he gets it then gets it into his lyrics.
Damn: I wish he taught a song-writing class. I would take that. I want to learn how to tell the story with fewer words, like he does.
