Jon Patrick Walker – The Rented Tuxedo & Other Songs
Independent – 8 October 2021
A jobbing actor by trade, mainly in TV and stage productions (most recently as King George III in Hamilton national tour), Walker also has a strong musical connection, having variously played Springsteen and Lennon on stage but, like Kiefer Sutherland, carving out a side career as a practising Americana musician with two previous albums and an EP to his name.
The Rented Tuxedo & Other Songs kicks off in sprightly, pedal steel laced shuffling scuffed snares style with the catchy country-pop Auto-Tune My Love (premiered here), moving to the midtempo sway of the Lennon-channelling The Stars, The Moon & The Sun that manages to sneak in a reference to Johnny Rotten on a song about embracing the moment.
The post-breakup title track The Rented Tuxedo is a dark and moody number (“I woke up in a motel room east of Laredo/In the town of Mirando in a rented tuxedo/I couldn’t remember my name anymore/I threw up then I stumbled to the motel room door/I knew it was all ‘cause of you, mi amor”). That said, it has a nice backstory, wherein Walker was at Sun Studio, unaware it was still fully functioning as such, booked in a session and asked a street busker if he could come and play blues harp, laying down the number in the very spot Elvis recorded That’s All Right. The song’s pretty good too.
With its echoey, muddy, distant vocals and muted organ, All Night Diner has a similar atmosphere, here coloured with Bowie shades. Later, a somewhat spooked intro gives way to the steady strum of the bluesy reflective Backwater Street, another echo of Lennon, then pedal steel that leads us into the dreamy wooziness of Love My Everblue. The latter being a song to his young daughter (“You came into this world, singing a song/And you taught us how to live, and sing along”), written after a health scare.
Sixties psychedelia is all over Station Wagon, which takes a ride in a “cream-colored canvas roll-down convertible 4-wheel drive”, drinking “Moon-beam tea” and throwing references to Eat A Peach, Danger Mouse, Puff The Magic Dragon, Lesley Gore, Imagine Dragons, and Frampton Comes Alive out of the window on the journey. Fun, but probably not for repeat play.
It gets serious with the spare Lennonesque blues Lookin For Eggs, an early song about him stumbling in on his dad “in a 69” with his girlfriend while looking for Easter eggs, his mom with her weed-smoking new man (“His name was Geoff, and he had one white eye-brow/He said it was because he was a half-warlock”), and her taking him to see Annie Hall, which brings it back to the title (“Alvie Singer told a joke/About a guy who’s wife thought she was a chicken/But the guy didn’t care, he didn’t care, no he didn’t care/Because he needed the eggs”). He says he wrote it noodling about on the piano, and it certainly has that feel. Having done Lennon, Bowie and splash of Nilsson, he ends up with Dylan for Love To You, a churchy organ providing the prelude to what is essentially a rewrite of All I Really Want To Do with a collection of rejected alternatives (“I don’t want to fold your clothes/Or tie your shoes or blow your nose”) that Bob never got round to including. It is, overall, a fairly whimsical listen of slightly shaggy dog tales, but like that rented tuxedo, it still dresses to impress.
Photo Credit: Danny O’Connor