Hair shorter, hat flatter, the alt-country singer-songwriter Dylan LeBlanc returns with Coyote, his fifth – and first self-produced album, on which, drawing on autobiographical details and featuring contributions by, among others, his father James, bassist Seth Kauffman, Austin Hoke on cello and The Secret Sisters on harmonies, he unfolds a conceptual song cycle about the titular loner, a refugee from his own life. Recorded at Muscle Shoals, the scene is set with the opening circling picked guitar notes, steady drum beat, falsetto sung bluesy title track, a term given to those paid to get someone across the Mexican border, the protagonist looking to join the local criminal underground (“Gonna steal a rich man’s gold/Gonna take what’s mine”), the lyrics referencing hoping to avoid the eyes of Santa Muerte, the personification of death and often prayed to for safe passage by cartel members making the crossing with “El Paso’s merchandise”.
Keeping the pace slow and the mood desert dry, Closin’ In weaves in piano and strings as he reflects on his life and choices and the girl he left behind (“Well it cut to me to the blood and bone/Your words were like the saddest song /I’d ever heard and now you’re gone”) as he speaks of how “This alcohol and Vicodin/Can’t stop the wall from closin’ in”.
Having realised that he’s made the wrong career choice, the sparse, claustrophobic, whisperingly sung, strings-swathed piano and picked Dark Waters has him overcome with self-loathing (“Can’t seem to stand who I become… Born where hell meets high water”) as he surveys the empire he’s built but how “all is won was an empty kingdom” and is reminded of all he lost. In his notes, LeBlanc remarks how he relates to this because, as a child, “I always felt bad and had a guilty conscience”.
The introspection continues with the slightly more uptempo, whining Neil Young-like Dust, finding him wanting to return to the woman he left behind but seeking to explain to himself why it wouldn’t work out (“That’s why I keep you at a stone’s throw away”), resigning himself to a life alone (“When I’m on my own/And the lights are on/But no one’s home/One by one/I watch it all fade away/Back into dust”), where he “can’t cut ties/With these monsters in a closet/In a house that’s always haunted”.
On the fingerpicked Forgotten Things, the first verse returns to his childhood where things first went wrong, leaving him unable to let go or deal with it (“I must have left my heart somewhere back in 1999/I saw the world much lesser than through open childlike eyes/But it wasn’t long before I got out in the world and trouble set like fire/That fire became such a blinding light and truth felt like a liar”) while the second again turns to his former lover (“And I see the face of the one I love/Before we headed south/Before my name was spoken of /And left a bad taste in your mouth”) as he decides to try and win her back. Which leads to the organ, mandolin and guitar folksy whine of the slow walk rhythm No Promises Broken with him vowing he’s changed (“I might have been born a bastard son but that ain’t how I’ll die/As long as I have the room to run with you by my side”), doing his utmost to regain her trust, and that, while things won’t be easy and the journey will be dangerous, he won’t break her heart again.
And, as they set off on the run, the perspective shifts with the slow and measured soulful Stranger Things sung from her point of view as hope rises with a new dawn (“We’ll be alright/In the end /We can wash it off/Like an ugly sin”). Things don’t stay sunny long as Hate again ploughs Youngian rock-churned furrows as Coyote wrestles with his demons, determined to fight for his reborn life. However, part of him still longs for the life he’s trying to put behind him (“When I’m feeling that hunger/I’m gonna do something bad/That makes everybody wonder/Who in the hell I really am”).
That side clearly gets the upper hand, and a Wicked Kind finds him in a Texas prison fighting to survive in a world of men like himself who will “Twist the knife rob you blind/Watch you bleed cold dead eyes”, as he finds himself staring at who he’s become (“The man in the mirror/Leaves me terrified/The picture’s clear/But the image is a lie/I used to know his name/Before the game cut him down to size”). So it is that he breaks out and, set to a steady desert noir riding beat, ends up on a week-long bender in Telluride, where he hooks up with a prostitute (all “Whisky and a red dress”) who comes up with a plan that will help them both out and reunite him and his lover and fill his emptiness.
Introducing gospel blues notes with piano and organ, The Human Kind is a slow burner with Steely Dan undertones about human nature, life’s fleeting nature (“Only here for a little while/Blink of an eye and it’s over”), and the importance people place on superficial things (“Nobody ever says enough is enough/All you ever hear is more/Then they get exactly what they want/Still ain’t what their searchin’ for”), a search for clarity as to what makes him tick and find the ability to understand the cracks in his soul and forgive himself.
LeBlanc puts the narrative to one side for the funky uptempo groove (shades of Gaye, Temptations and Mayfield) of The Crowd Goes Wild, a musing on how, down through time, people have revelled in the troubles of others (“See the man of misfortune/He’s so broken and so tortured/And the crowd goes wild”), and the way the system is rigged so the unfortunate can never win or rise above the circumstances into which they’re born (“And the cycle goes on and on/Somebody done somebody wrong/Though the words may change the headlines/Stay the same”).
It concludes with the musical swirl and steady drum thump of The Outside, the lovers reunited again and on the run in a stolen black Camaro (“Tearin’ up and down a canyon road/Tears running down her black mascara/Wondering if she’ll ever see him grow old”), heading back across the border to Mexico only to be pulled up late at night at a Los Angeles roadblock as, not sure what to do, the narrative fades to black with, “One hand on his steel vaquero/Hoping that he won’t have to fight this time”. Very much a Southern Gothic mood piece, drawing on such antecedents as Badlands, Wild At Heart, the writings of James Sallis and Cormac McCarthy, the music of Neil Young and Chris Isaak, LeBlanc has crafted a sparse, cinematic vision of an American dystopia.