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| Spirit In The Room 2013 |
627 Miles To Go
Of all the legacy gifts Johnny Cash left us, his American Recordings series with Rick Rubin remains among his most influential.In addition to reviving Cash's career, they inspired several of his contemporaries to pursue similar projects in which they stripped down the production to lay the vocals and lyrics as naked as possible.
Neil Diamond's 12 Songs and Home Before Dark (also produced by Rubin), Kris Kristofferson's trilogy of This Old Road, Closer To The Bone and Feeling Mortal, as well as Glen Campbell's Ghost On The Canvas all come to mind.
The latest to follow this path is Tom Jones with Spirit In The Room. Ethan Johns plays the role of Rubin, as well as guitar and other instruments on each of album's 13 songs.
Johns previously produced Jones' similarly rootsy Praise And Blame (2010), and worked with The Jayhawks, Ryan Adams, Ray LaMontagne and Kings of Leon among many others.
For Spirit In The Room, Jones and Johns also pull from the Tom Waits/Marc Ribot playbook to create an album full of moody, spooky arrangements and purposely scratchy backgrounds that would sound at home on the latest Waits releases.
Jones even polishes the vocals with a less garbled growl for an otherwise similar take on the title track to Waits' (with Ribot) Bad As Me (2011).
The 73-year-old Welshman kicks off the album with a cover of Leonard Cohen's Tower Of Song that rates as 2013's most haunting song of the year. It leaves little doubt that when his time comes, Jones will get to ask Hank Williams himself, "How lonely does it get?"
Though Jones' fame comes as much for his abilities as an entertainer as a singer, he's not kidding when he croons, "I was born like this/I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice."
He spends the rest of Spirit In The Room showing it off.
From the atmospheric gospel of All Blues Hail Mary and Lone Pilgrim (an original written by Jones and Johns) to the dark blues of Blind Willie Johnson's Soul Of A Man to the slow ballads of Richard Thompson's Dimming Of The Day and Paul McCartney's (I Want To) Come Home, Jones sounds comfortable regardless of which room and which spirit he's singing with.
Other highlights include a Waits-fashioned stab at Just Dropped In and the closing Bob Dylan's When The Deal Goes Down, sung from the hymnal with merry-go-round music playing lightly behind the vocals.
On Hit Or Miss, Jones proclaims, "There ain't nobody just like this/I gotta be me, Baby/Hit or miss."
Spirit In The Room is all hit and no miss. Let's hope Jones pays attention to Cash and keeps swinging just like this for multiple sequels to come.
Song For The Soundtrack: Bad As Me
Running Data For Saturday, May 25:
4.52 Miles
49:48
Mileage In The Change Jar: 0.05 Miles
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