Will Stewart – County Seat
Cornelius Chapel Records – Out Now
Securing a wider platform following its American release last year, the Birmingham, Alabama singer-songwriter’s solo debut (he currently fronts Timber) offers up a solid set of classic styled guitar-driven country rock. Although he’s said it was inspired by The Cowboy Junkies seminal release, The Trinity Sessions, more obviously the influences draw variously on the likes of REM, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and, on a more contemporary note, Hiss Golden Messenger.
It opens in sterling jangling guitar and pedal steel style with Sipsey (premiered on Folk Radio here), a small town just outside of Tupelo, setting a recurring theme of time and reflection with its nostalgia for young adulthood innocence, one echoed at the other end of the album in the Young-coloured title track its narrator and elderly figure looking back and longing to find something beyond the soul-draining nature of everyday mundanity.
The fact that Stewart returned home after spending some time living in Nashville also feeds into the music and lyrics of restlessness and seeking roots, cases in point being the spare, two-minute steel-stained Brush Arbor, a reference to Dennis Covington’s 1995 book about his travels in Southern Appalachia, Salvation on Sand Mountain, and the slow strum waltz of the tranquillity-seeking Equality AL, another small home state town.
Built around a repetitive circling guitar riff, musically, the punchiest track is probably Dark Halls, a number very much in the vein of early Dylan, but it’s the friskier numbers that have the hooks, such as Rosalee, an uptempo number about talking a woman out of her suicidal feelings, or the mid-tempo sway of the electric guitar bolstered Heaven Knows Why in its woman-tracked journey from despondency to hope.
On a whimsical note, the 55-second banjo and guitar instrumental Otis In The Morning is a tribute to Stewart’s Goldendoodle dog, leaving the remaining number to be the sole cover, closing up proceedings with an Everlys-styled double-tracked harmonies reading of Justin Tubb’s honky-tonk Mine Is A Lonely Life. A county seat is an administrative centre from which legislation for the region is handed down. Checking out this album should be a matter of policy.
Order County Seat via Cornelius Chapel Records | Bandcamp
Photo Credit: Wes Frazer