Rod Picott
Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows
Welding Rod Records
2022
Produced by Neilson Hubbard, Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows is Rod Picott‘s fourteenth album, which came together during the pandemic, whittling down 25 songs to the 12 featured here. The album is lush and raw, both personal and narrative, all seasoned with Picott’s matured voice.
It opens on a personal note with the simple fingerpicked guitar, slide and piano Lover, a wearied lament for finding himself alone (“I’ve been without love for so long/I’ve forgotten the words to that song”) but still with just enough left in the engine and an ache in the bones to want to give love another shot.
A similar sentiment underpins the fingerpicked Mona Lisa, blue-collar romantic aches and yearnings about a bruised heart (“I’ve been hiding in the basement/Too chicken shit I might get hurt”) longing to find a fellow lonely soul to share his life with (“I’m waiting here for you/You got a streetlight of your own somewhere and your waitin’ on me too”), echoing the Springsteen’s “You ain’t a beauty, but, hey, you’re alright” as he sings “You’re not the Mona Lisa/I’m not your James Dean/You’re not a painting from a master/I’m no hero from a movie scene/But I am waiting here for you”.
And if not love, then lust, here smouldering through the smoky shuffling Dirty T-Shirt with its elemental hormonal eroticism (“I like you in your dirty t shirt darlin’/You don’t need to brush your hair/Just pick a destination/I’ll do the dirty work to get you there”), the desire veined with a tenderness (“She was an angel on my shoulder sleeping deeply in a dream/I didn’t move so not to wake her/Though I had fire running in my veins”), but again returning to that running theme of “One more chance to be alive/One more night to try to feel”.
In complete contrast, inspired by Taylor Brown’s novel Gods of Howl Mountain, Revenuer is a bluesy prowler about a traumatised war veteran bootlegger, a “6 foot deep welcome mat” laid for the federals from DC, selling his hooch to everyone from church-going girls to preachers, “From the white dress to the shiny black shoe”, to take care of the woman he loves.
Two further narratives follow; another simple fingerpicked number, Frankie Lee, a co-write with newcomer Jennifer Tortorici in a Nebraska mould, is a classic first-person outlaw story, again about a good man turning to bad deeds when fate deals a lousy hand (“I’m not ashamed to say/I stole every cent I ever made/But what’s a poor boy to do/When they take your land away”) told as he faces the electric chair for the murder of a duplicitous banker.
From fiction, he turns to biography for Sonny Liston, the latest addition to a catalogue of songs about the iconic boxer. Set to a walking rhythm slide and twang coloured, it gives an account of his dark and troubled life (“The saddest face that you ever did see”), his ties to organised crime and abusive childhood (“His momma didn’t know/When his birthday was/All his daddy ever gave him was a beating”), his exploitation by the men in suits (They saw a big fat check/In Sonny’s right hand”) and how “His own people wouldn’t give him no pass”, before being controversially floored by Cassius Clay and how finally “They found him dead on his bed at home/A needle mark in his arm/Didn’t have a dollar in his pocket they said… The cops left him for his wife to find/The law couldn’t even be troubled”.
The second half gets underway with Hubbard on piano and drums for the rolling rhythm, cascading guitar lines, and infectious hooks and Petty/Springsteen of Through The Dark, a Slaid Cleaves co-write about looking for light in the darkness (“We can’t fight a storm/but we can wait it out… I’ll keep the flame for you/hold you through the doubt”) that sports the memorable line about “Licking honey from thorns/Just trying to hold on to our hope”.
Valentine’s Day returns to matters of love and loneliness, recorded initially as a full band version but then recast as just Picott and his guitar bringing a real ache as he sings, “You used to hold me but I held you back/Somewhere the train/Slipped from the track/A guilty man is always gonna pay/Here I stand no one’s hand in my hand”, burned by the memories of what was lost (“In a box I keep under my bed/A dusty card in the shape of a heart/And words you once said”).
Something of a songwriting exercise, Washington County, a collaboration with Mark Erelli that, developed from Picott’s social media postings about his time in Maine with his elderly father, takes the form of a story song about poverty and people struggling to survive (“Once a month we hit the food bank/Once a month we reach the end/Of the rope we’re clinging onto/And the check the county sends”) brought about by economic collapse (“There used to be some work/Down at the pulp mill/There used to be some money cutting trees/But they bought up every lot/Along the coastline/Turned it all into BnBs”) where “You choose to move or just stay poor”.
Place is also the foundation of the autobiographically-based Lost In the South, a fingerpicked pedal steel, a stained reflection of the culture shock of moving from New England (“My daddy was a blue-collar man”) to Nashville (“a Yankee lost in the south”), people’s reactions (“Hookers and the dealers/Saw my out of state plates/Banging on my door all night long”) and the patronising attitudes he encountered from the old money (“Said maybe you can be one of my boys/I said I’m not boy I’m a full grown man”), and how it turned a mirror on who he was (“Funny how you don’t hear how you sound/Til you’re a pilgrim washed up on some foreign ground”).
The theme of identity seeps over into the penultimate fingerpicked acoustic Mark Of Your Father, which begins with his complicated distant relationship with his own machismo father, who didn’t get his son’s artistic leaning, moves through a friend’s experience of living his dad’s dreams (“A dusty Gibson behind the attic door/The stargazing died/Hold the neck and make a chord/Pick up the dream he left behind”) and ends with Marvin Gaye’s death, shot and killed by his father in an argument.
The need to forge your own path and be your own person brings the album to a close with a second Cleaves co-write, the reflective, low key, intimately sung Make Your Own Light, observing that you have to look inside yourself and not at the reflections from others (“You can find it in a lover/That only works for a time/It feels real but it’s only pantomime”) of the moulding by experience (“in order to land/You’re gonna have to leave/If you want to laugh you’re gonna grieve”) and that if “you want to create well you’ve got to destroy/To become a man and say goodbye to the boy”.
Picott says he thinks this might be the best album he’s made. I think he may be right.
Paper Hearts and Broken Arrows is out on 10 June 2022
Rod will be playing a 17-date UK tour from June 15; see below.
UK Tour Dates
JUNE
Wed 15 London Green Note presents… @ The Water Rats
Thu 16 Bristol The Hen & Chicken
Fri 17 High Wycombe Kingsmead House Concert
Wed 22 Glasgow Sound In The Suburbs @ Glad Cafe
Thu 23 Garstang, Lancs. Calder Vale Country Club (
Fri 24 Newbald, East Yorks. Newbald Acoustic Sessions @ Newbald Village Hall
Sat 25 Harpley, West Norfolk Harpley Village Hall
Sun 26 Eccleshall, Staffs. The Royal Oak
Mon 27 Northwich Sabado Presents @ Davenham Players Theatre
Tue 28 Appleby Magna, Leics. The Cellar Bar
Wed 29 Nottingham Cosmic Americana @ The Running Horse
Thu 30 Sheffield WagonWheel Presents @ The Greystones
JULY
Fri 1 Easton, Suffolk The Maverick Festival 2022 @ Easton Farm Park
Sat 2 Easton The Maverick Festival 2022 @ Easton Farm Park
Sun 3 Twickenham TwickFolk @ The Cabbage Patch
Mon 4 Sutton, South London The Sound Lounge (USA Day of Independence) – Songwriters In The Round with Jess Jocoy and Hannah Aldridge