Dixie Blur

Album review

After Jonathan Wilson released 2018's wonderful Rare Birds, he realized he'd taken his third album of Topanga Canyon psychedelia-drenched singer/songwriter sound to its zenith, and needed a new direction. He found it inadvertently while appearing on NPR's eTown with Steve Earle. The elder songwriter advised him to travel to Nashville and take advantage of its top-notch studio aces. Wilson was more than intrigued. He headed East and enlisted Wilco's Pat Sansone as co-producer. The next call was to the iconic fiddler Mark O'Connor. Growing up in North Carolina, Wilson recalled with excitement the fiddle's place in country, mountain, and bluegrass music. O'Connor hadn't been a session musician since the '90s, but Wilson pleaded and cajoled convincingly and he agreed to participate. He and Sansone hired an illustrious cast of sidemen: guitarist Kenny Vaughn, bassist Dennis Crouch, pedal steel player Russ Pahl, Jim Hoke on woodwinds and harmonica, drummer Jon Radford, and keyboardist Drew Erickson. They all holed up at Cowboy Jack Clement's Sound Emporium Studio for six days and cut the album live from the studio floor; there are precious few overdubs.
Dixie Blur sounds exactly like what it is: Wilson's take on Americana, country, bluegrass, and West Texas dancehall music. The set is as cosmic as it is country. Despite looking in the rearview at familial and cultural inspirations of yore, Wilson doesn’t leave the Topanga Canyon completely behind. "Heaven Makin' Love" comes out of the gate sounding like an early Eddie Rabbitt track before O'Connor, Vaughn, and Pahl surround Wilson's tender vocals with a wonderfully charged fusion of mariachi and Doug Sahm's brand of Tex-Mex, complete with jangly Left Coast psychedelia in the bridge. "So Alive" weds rootsy Americana to bluegrass with acoustic flatpicking from Vaughn doing his best Doc Watson as O'Connor's fiddle swirls around him. "'69 Corvette" recalls Harvest-era Neil Young with its poetic lyrics offering a narrative of longing and homesickness and accompanied by crying pedal steel. The overdubbed backing chorus is forlorn and Baroque-sounding. "O'Girl" is an outlier with its lilting woodwinds, rock & roll snares, and screaming electric leads amid swelling vocal choruses and keyboards. Meanwhile, the erstwhile early rock & roll on "Enemies" evokes Phil Spector and Jack Nitszche in a maximalist country song. "El Camino Real" is a stomping country-bluegrass jam with upright piano, wailing fiddle, and jangling guitars. The album closer is a re-recording of "Korean Tea" that Wilson originally cut with Muscadine in the '90s. This version offers a modern take on Wilson's Topanga Canyon sound. Dixie Blur is Wilson's most personal and direct collection of songs. They are wrought poetically from memory and inspired by the excellence of the sublime performances from his sidemen.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo