The Great Escape

Album review

Chris Stamey's a songwriting connoisseur. In recent years this co-founder of the dB's, the influential '80s power pop band, has been paying tribute to classic pop song history and making a virtue of musical nostalgia. His last two solo albums, New Songs for the 20th Century (2019) and A Brand-New Shade of Blue (2020) successfully revived the kind of direct and unabashedly romantic pop songwriting that preceded rock and roll—without being boring or trite. The Great Escape, on the other hand, is a collection filled with the kind of indie rock the singer-songwriter has been making since the late 1970s. It opens with the one-two punch of the sunny, easy-to-like guitar pop of the title track and the even better "Realize." Both are reasonable facsimiles of the deep tracks that make the original pair of dB's albums so special. A welcome artifact is an earnest revival of the unknown Alex Chilton/Tommy Hoehn tune "She Might Look My Way," featuring engineering and producing legend Mitch Easter on drums and Terry Manning of Stax/Ardent Studios fame on guitar, bass, vocals, and mellotron flutes. Later, Stamey evokes the Byrds with the happy rhythms, massed voices, and nimble pedal steel of his wedding song, "I Will Try" as well as the rolling lilt and obvious title reference of "The Sweetheart of the Video." His autobiographical "Greensboro Days" harks back to '60s "California Dreamin'"-styled sunshine pop. Led by the pedal steel of Eric Heywood and the lap steel and dobro of Allyn Love, there's also a slight country shade to some of the songs. This includes the majestic and mournful ballad, "(A Prisoner of This) Hopeless Love," where fiddle accompanies lines like "jealousy and a wandering eye will tear your love apart" which force the undone narrator to concede he's "just a prisoner of this hopeless love, until my day is done." The mood swings the other way in the bubbly and sentimental "Back In New York." A nod to Stamey's continuing fascination with Tin Pan Alley that appears in both acoustic and electric versions, it's a fairy tale love song to Gotham where "the subways sing a lullaby" and where he wants to revel in a "jingle jangle morning where Dave Van Ronk would sing, where Trane played 'E-pis-tro-phy.'" A romantic versed in many genres, Chris Stamey continues to make the case that illuminating songwriting never goes out of style. © Robert Baird/Qobuz