Darrin Bradbury – Talking Dogs & Atom Bombs
Anti- – 27 September 2019
Raised in New Jersey and now based in Nashville, self-described folk satirist Darrin Bradbury has what you might call a somewhat idiosyncratic style, perhaps best exemplified in the opening lines of the Prine-like title track “If my dog could talk he would probably say/’Get off your ass, you’ve spent too much time on the couch today’/And if the cat could speak, you know she wouldn’t say a word/But it’s what’s left unsaid that always seems to hurt.”
That sardonic sense of humour permeates the album, on which he’s joined by producer Kenneth Pattengale (The Milk Carton Kids) on mellotron, Alex Muñoz on electric guitars and lap steel, drummer Dillon Napier and, on bass and piano, similarly offbeat fellow Nashville writer Jeremy Ivey who contributes the jog-along Nothing Much (“I been sitting in a hurricane like a notebook left in the rain/Waiting for the medicine to ease my pain, sitting in a hurricane/Just staring at this loaf of bread, beating a horse that’s already dead”) and co-penned the simply strummed So Many Ways to Die which, as the title suggests, is a list of potential ways to shuffle off this mortal coil (“Sit around and wait for old age/Or take a cue from Hemingway’s page”).
Bradbury says the songs were born from dealing with depression and the pressures of life by poking fun at it and, indeed, it’s hard not to raise a wry smile at something like Breakast in which the mundanity is transformed by becoming the god of Cerealtown, Pouring on the milk so that “all of god’s oat children drowned” or, a personal favourite, the Texicali chugging Hell’s More or Less the Same, an update from the underworld that can get away with a bad pun like “the picture cried out, I swear I’ve been framed” in a song that basically takes a cynical look at America where “We’re under new ownership but hell’s more or less the same”.
And, talking of which, comes the snapshot of the baritone guitar-backed wistful ballad The American Life where “In the cold 4th quarter, the family flocks to the shopping mall/‘Cause in America, we buy our blues away”, offering the pointed observation that:
The American Life is franchised fear and cow milk
The American Life is the presumption that people are dumb
The American Life is fried chicken taking a political stance
It’s a church built like a stadium
And while we’re talking such metaphors, symbolism and imagery, check out the 78-second Strange Bird, a stomping surreal trip in which a feathered hallucination pops up through the mouth of Walter Cronkite on TV announcing he’s come for “Coca-Cola, Judas Priest, and Captain Crunch” before departing for “Algiers, to find Dwight Yoakam, and crack cocaine”.
On a more down to earth note, Margo Price puts in a vocal appearance on the slow rumble of The Trouble With Time, a beautifully low key song about how, while “the trouble with time is you can take a wrong step/End up somewhere you tried to forget” painful memories can still be comforting as he confesses “Sometimes I walk through the bad just to walk with you”. A similar theme underpins the sprightly fingerpicked Prine-styled semi-talking blues This Too Shall Pass, a reminder that when “You’ve got a heart that’s heavy like a suitcase at the airport that you wish you could leave behind/And every thought in your head is a piece of stale bread on the kitchen counter of your life” such things will pass, “albeit like a kidney stone” but “Sadness it don’t leave you till its ready”.
Elsewhere, in Dallas 1963 he wakes from a dream where he shot Kennedy while on the carnival waltzer Motel Room, Motel Room he’s out on the road in a room that smells “like Lysol and sex”, spinning metaphors of life as he thinks of previous strangers in the bed and listening to the couple in the next room where “Fame is coming, I can hear her moan through the walls/Took her a while to get there but I suppose that’s true for us all”.
We need more albums and more songsmiths like this. At one point he sings “When the going gets tough, they say the tough it gets going/But the saying never indicates which direction they’re going”, I suggest you follow Bradbury’s.
Photo Credit: Danielle Holbert