Kiefer Sutherland – Reckless & Me
BMG – 26 April 2019
Best known for his role of Jack Bauer in television series 24 and currently running America as the reluctant President in Designated Survivor, Sutherland, like fellow actor Kevin Costner, also has a parallel career as an alt-country singer, one which, like Costner, isn’t confined to studio recordings booths, with some 1000 shows already under his belt.
Reckless and Me is his second album, following on from 2016’s Down In A Hole and is again produced by co-writer Jude Cole, Sutherland having a hand in six of the ten tracks which could be loosely described as falling into the outlaw country bracket. It opens with the raspingly sung mid-tempo Open Road, a song written back in 1987 when he and Cole were on a road trip, the former en route to film 1969 and the latter heading to Memphis to launch his debut album, the song born from the fact that Sutherland fell asleep and Cole sang to keep himself awake.
Adding Lifehouse’s Jason Wade to the credits, the alt-country chugging, piano-pumping Something You Love is pretty much a mission statement about finding a purpose to being alive, especially when you get older and the setbacks kick in, whether that’s to “sing the song loud or hit the ball hard.”
While rooted in alt-country, the easy rolling Faded Blue Jeans also comes with hints of Petty and some of Penn and Oldham’s southern soul , perhaps even a touch of Van Morrison, not to mention a reference to G&R t-shirts, but then things toughen up with the slow bluesy title track sounding clearly autobiographical notes about his attitude to life. Spreading the influences around, the sole cover is the saloon piano, pedal steel and dance floor friendly dose of country rock n roll Blame It On Your Heart, a song penned by Harlan Howard and Kostas Lazarides and originally recorded by Patty Loveless in 1963.
It hangs around the honky tonk a little longer for the barrelling Cash-styled This Is How It’s Done, a song inspired by the youthful memory of two firsts, going into a bar and seeing two men beating the crap out of one another. Quite how you relate the background story to the song’s message rather depends on whether you raise hell or raise a complaint. And speaking of which, fuelled by a lethal Tequila cocktail relationship, Agave is another throaty outlaw blues, driven by a dirty guitar riff and drums, a tinge of the Allmans in the keys, the boogie swaggering along, after a false start, with the whisky drawled Run To Him.
It ends with two very personal songs, the reflective steel coloured slow sway of Saskatchewan written on a plane flying to see his mother who’d just suffered a second stroke, not knowing if she’d be alive or dead when he arrived though the line about going back “to put my momma in the ground” suggests he didn’t have the most optimistic outlook. For the record, she’s now 85.
The title of the final track speaks for itself, Song for a Daughter is a Tex-Mex-tinted swayalong strum, a father’s love letter spurred by seeing a photo of the now 31-year-old as a baby as he sings “When I’m over and done/ Know you were the one/ That made the love in my heart last.”
Already a sizeable chart success and with a UK tour lined up for October, Sutherland has spent most of his adult inhabiting characters and life telling stories. This is firm evidence that he can do it with behind a guitar just as well as he can do it in front of a camera.