{"id":43148,"date":"2013-05-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/down-this-road\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","slug":"down-this-road","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/down-this-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Down This Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

When last we met singer-songwriter-guitarist Scott Kurt, he was fronting Memphis 59<\/a>, an Arlington, Virginia trio that sounded a little like Steve Earle, Tom Petty and George Jones put in a blender\u2014jangly country-rock tunes full of barroom wisdom, sung with heart and conviction.<\/p>\n

Kurt\u2019s solo debut Down This Road<\/i> is indistinguishable from Memphis 59 in terms of sound: ringing guitars, check; 4\/4 backbeats embellished with country touches like banjo and slide, check; cleverly-constructed tall tales of long nights spent in one honky-tonk after another, check. Any of these seven terrific songs would have fit nicely on Memphis 59\u2019s 2009 disc Ragged But Right<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Opening things up with ringing piano and a snaking, muscular guitar riff, Kurt paints a picture out of every honky-tonk classic ever written: \u201cWaking up in last night\u2019s clothes \/ The smell of beer and cigarette smoke \/ How the hell I got home, I don\u2019t know.\u201d The narrator clearly has a problem, but he\u2019s not looking for a way out, just living his life, which makes for this memorable chorus: \u201cI swore I wouldn\u2019t drink last night \/ But my friends bought me a round \/ I swore I wouldn\u2019t fall in love \/ But then she came around.\u201d Kurt\u2019s assertive guitar lines and the rhythm section supply the rock, while the sharply observant lyric and a banjo lurking in the mix provide the country. <\/p>\n

\u201cLast Call\u201d follows, a steady-building rocker with a rippling chorus hook supporting the story of a guy at the bar who\u2019s been hanging back, too shy to make a move, all night long and now he\u2019s down to his last chance: \u201cTime won\u2019t wait \/ This night won\u2019t last forever.\u201d This very catchy interior monologue is full of hard-won insight.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything Is Alright\u201d isn\u2019t quite an homage, but if you can listen to it without thinking of Tom Petty\u2019s \u201cHere Comes My Girl,\u201d I\u2019d like to know how. Yes, it\u2019s got a fat backbeat and Kurt\u2019s urgent, keening voice rather than a slumbering melody and Tom\u2019s laconic everyman persona, but it\u2019s the same timeless sentiment, wrapped up in a propulsive new package. <\/p>\n

The quality of Kurt\u2019s songwriting is apparent once again when he hits on another timeless bit of subject matter\u2014strained father-son relations\u2014and manages to give it a fresh and tender twist with \u201cMy Father\u2019s Son,\u201d a reconciliation song with a pretty melody. <\/p>\n

Emphasizing the rich musical tradition from which Kurt draws, \u201cThese Four Wheels\u201d offers a jangly, propulsive road song referencing the grand history of them. \u201cLike the last day of high school \/ We all know how that feels\u201d\u2014yeah, that\u2019s the stuff. It somehow took me until the third listen to catch the Springsteen reference in this, Kurt\u2019s own \u201cThunder Road.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bringing this disc to an end all too soon\u2014it\u2019s closer to an EP in length than a full-fledged album\u2014\u201cCome Here Look\u201d and \u201cI Ain\u2019t Living Long Like This\u201d deliver another fun pair of barroom rockers, the first about falling (and staying) in love with the girl across the bar, the second a Rodney Crowell cover that\u2019s a full-tilt bad-boy country-rocker.<\/p>\n

Like I said when reviewing Ragged But Right<\/i>, this is some risky business Kurt is up to, meeting the masters on their home turf. If you lack either skill or conviction, this sort of thing can come off as derivative or hackneyed. But Kurt clearly knows exactly what he\u2019s doing; he doesn\u2019t just understand the honky-tonk rock and roller genre, he\u2019s absorbed its legends and nuances into his blood. Down This Road<\/i> takes classic forms and infuses them with a freshness and vibrancy that reveals their power all over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":31446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[9121],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-43148","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-scott-kurt","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43148"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43148"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}