Ry Cavanaugh – Time For This
Cav Productions – 27 March 2020
Currently frontman with Session Americana, this is Ry Cavanaugh’s first solo album in 20 years. However, the songs were all penned some 40 years earlier by his late father, George, a honky-tonk singer in the late 70s working under the alias of the Bobby Pedd Band, here reworked and recorded with Duke Levine on guitar and backing vocals by Jennifer Kimball.
With just the two guitars it’s clearly a stripped back affair, giving full expression to his aching vocals and opening with Carillon (presumably a reference to the neighbourhood in Richmond) with its railroad lyric about trying to find a train “to carry me back home” or “ride all the way to paradise”. Set to a simply strummed pulse, Cold Wind carries that same air of resignation. This mood carries over into the slow waltz-time confessional Too Tired For Drinking as he sings of having “burned all my bridges”, poignantly resonating with the fact his father died at 40 of heart failure after a lengthy battle with depression and prescription opiate addiction.
He picks up the tempo slightly with Lost Woman Song, a song about mutual respect (“she’s there with you because she wants to be…you can spend your life in love with her but she don’t belong to you”) with its hints of Tim Hardin in the voice and melody before slowing it back down on Time For This with its evocation of 60s Greenwich Village folksiness and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Sharing the same bone-weariness to be often heard in Dylan’s I Shall Be Released and the lyrics also of a decided Dylanish note. Trinity, a road song, has him singing of waking up to a “phone call from God” asking about how the “the sun had left this morning saying something about the coast, wanting to know if I can help him get in touch with the Holy Ghost”.
The fingerpicked, chorus-friendly Sink Or Swim is another musically jauntier track, but then he turns to the Mississippi blues with Help Me Doctor, a number clearly referencing Cavanaugh Senior’s problems before closing back in reflective fingerpicked style with Gypsy Dad, a song, presumably about his father’s own father, about the lure of the freedom of the road and wanting to “live my life in my own true way” even though it’s also a “trail of tears”.
Honest, stark, intimate and open, listening takes you back to the time when names like Tim Hardin, Bob Lind, Eric Anderson, the young Paul Simon and Walker were singing in the coffee bars to mesmerised audiences discovering the birth of a new folk boom. It’s a wonderful place to revisit and, honouring the memory of his father, George Cavanaugh, makes a perfect guide.
Photo Credit: Jason Goodman