Rich Krueger – The Troth Sessions
Rockin’K Music – Out Now
Rich Krueger is another singer-songwriter who’s been using lockdown to sort through his stash of unreleased demos. These hark back to 2002, the year he returned to the stage for a one-off appearance commemorating 9/11 (he’d quit in 1996, dedicating himself to practising medicine) and it would be another sixteen years before he returned to music, winning the Kerrville New Folk Competition and releasing his debut album, Life Ain’t That Long and the follow-up, NOWThen, neither of them featuring any of the demos here.
The Troth Sessions were recorded with just him and a guitar, the title coming from the word ‘betrothed’ after he realised many of them were about breakups and marriages. Indeed, the opener, True True Love, the first he’d written in five years and the last for another six, was penned for a friend’s wedding, a number on which, sounding uncannily as he does throughout like Loudon Wainwright III, he references both Milton’s Lycidas and his longtime friend Peter Stampfel (Holy Modal Rounders).
The second, the slow-paced blues-inflected story sketch Charlie Guitar, with its simple repeated pattern and talking blues approach, was written in 1988 as a tribute to little-known Chicago guitarist Charle Koster (who died in 1999), described as “versatile as coal tar”, while, from two years earlier comes the delicately fingerpicked Love’s Gonna Break The Fall (“you bound me in your arms, you came and set me free”).
An earlier wedding commission, written as a groom’s speech and again a simple wander across the frets, the playful and tender Amazing dates from 1991. Then comes the powerfully emotive song that prompted the demo sessions, The Ballad of Mary O’Connor, adding lyrics to a song by his former college colleagues, Mark Hallmann and Greg Kotis, writers of the 2001 Broadway satirical music Urinetown. Krueger has been asked to sing it at Brave New World, the show being staged by American Theatres Response to 9/11. Not wishing to screw it up, he booked a studio and recorded this demo, the story of a woman (whose name, of course, is the Mary in Rose of Tralee, hence the Irish musical shadings) who, traumatised after the Twin Towers attack, finally summons the courage to return to her office in the Empire State Building.
A self-confessed (and highly successful) attempt to channel Elvis Costello that dates back to 1987, jealous lover murder ballad The One You Love (“you were the last one I though of/When I killed the one you love”) suggests his country flavoured Almost Blue album in particular but would have been equally at home on Loudon’s Fame and Wealth. Titled in reference to the German theoretical physicist and quantum mechanics pioneer, things don’t get quite so dramatic in the Randy Newman-esque moodily strummed The Uncertainty Principle (After Heisenberg), but it’s still a break-up number, albeit with a light-hearted wit, but there’s a swing to the more upbeat for There’s A Wideness In God’s Mercy which, as every good Catholic should know, is a heartfelt setting of the hymnal by 19th century Yorkshire convert Frederick William Faber.
Following that religious note it perhaps ends fittingly with the Heaven, though the song, which musically has a touch of Nilsson’s Coconut about it, is in fact about a romantic afterlife with two lovers gazing at one another, rather bizarrely likened to “Walt Disney and James Thurber/Lying in each other’s arms/Swapping spittle and new fables” because “Up in Heaven/who’s to say things do not happen this way”.
I have to admit, prior to this I’d never come across Krueger, but, won over by his voice and way with words, I’m definitely going to make a point of catching up on his two studio albums.