Last year, Thomm Jutz teamed with Martin Simpson and a variety of guest vocalists for Nothing But Green Willow; this year, the German-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter links guitars with Red Beet Records founder on Simple Motions. This is not their first collaboration; they were also part of the Last Train Home trio with the late Peter Cooper. For Simple Motions, they are joined by fiddler Tammy Rogers, bassist Mark Fain, drummer Lynn Williams, mandolinist Mike Crompton and banjo players Richard Bailey and Justin Moses for an album of folksy Americana in its various shades on a collection of songs largely themed around, as the title suggests, life in motion.
Trains are the first mode of transport with Frost On the Southside, a banjo bubbling number recalling how, from 1890 to 1930, trains from back east called “harvest excursion trains” brought crews of workers west to bring in the wheat fields of the Canadian plains but also reflecting on how the march of progress rendered such work redundant with the advent of the combine harvester (“Machine won’t break for supper/Machine will always win/I know that nothing ever stays/The way it was before/Time’s over for a man like me”).
A co-write between Jutz and Finn Goodwin-Bain, Burn is a simply picked number that sums up its message succinctly in the chorus – “Travelin’ to be traveling/Learnin’ just to learn/Unraveling and unravelling/Around every turn/If you wanna light the way/Burn”. Then it’s back on the train tracks for the Gordon Lightfoot-tinged duo-penned title wheels-rolling number about how the railways helped define North America, moving freight and people from one place to another and how they could “Put the small town on the map/Then wipe it off it just the same”, the lonesome whistle in the night, “crying like a ghost”, prompting the singer’s “wish for everything that’s gone.”
Shaded with ragtime, Outside Views musically sounds more upbeat than the subject matter about how miserable weather dampens the creative muse, and you end up just staring out the window and letting it wash over you (“Folded arms and vacant stares/Daydreams vanished in the air”), though they did at least get a song out of doing that.
Banjo and guitar provide the framework on Better Days, their lockdown number (“The neighborhood is looking different/There’s a distance/It’s so much more/More than we could ever measure…when I wake up in the morning…I open up my eyes/And I remember/ Everything has changed”) and about looking for signs of hope and positivity (“There’s a boy up the block/Practicing trumpet on his porch/What does he know/He’s just a kid/But he sounds so good playing/These are a few of my favorite things”).
Cooper’s presence lives on with his Prine-styled waltzing Jutz co-write Can’t Change The Weather, a true story about how the trio’s separate travel plans in Ireland, Nashville and Spain were scuppered by bad weather that becomes the received wisdom of the serenity prayer in its singalong refrain “you can’t change the weather/You can’t unscramble eggs/You can’t change the future/Pokin’ ‘round in the dregs/Come to think about it/Ain’t that much you can do/If you can’t change the weather/Let the weather blow through”.
On a related theme, Brace’s solo contribution, the lazing Anywhere But Here, is deftly summed up in the notes, “They say you can’t outrun your troubles, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick around and invite them to supper”, or as, musing on a broken relationship, he sings “Gimme a ride to the train station/I’ll get out of your hair/I’ll get on the next one leaving/Going anywhere, anywhere/Anywhere but here… Point me in a new direction I’m tired of wondering why/Why I’m going anywhere but here”.
The pace picks up on When London Was The World, an old time dance hall swing number recalling the 1930s and how, with “Top hat and tuxedo/Or a string of pearls”, song and dance lifted everyone’s spirits with London being the epicentre, the track referencing the infamous Kit Kat Club as featured in Cabaret when “Before all hell broke loose/Berlin was a feather boa”.
Having sung of trains earlier, they turn to boats for Adam & Eve’, the title referencing the two small rocky islands just past the mouth of Glandore Harbour, off the south coast of Ireland and, featuring Jeff Taylor on accordion and tin whistle, the Celtic-infused song recounting the tragic wreck of the fishing boat Tit Bonhomme during a storm in 2011 with the loss of five of the six crew. On a connected thread of mortality, What You Get For Getting Older, a bluegrass banjo and fiddle balladry collaboration between Jutz and Rogers concerns the realisation that the road behind you is longer than the one ahead and coming to appreciate the miles you have left.
Another Brace solo returns to the theme of travelling with Ramble, a simple call to get out and enjoy walking in nature (“Don’t need a train and you don’t need a car/No, you don’t need a map/To show where you are/One foot then the other/Don’t matter how far/Put on your shoes and ramble”). Life in motion continues with Arkansas, a number inspired by Brace overhearing a woman on her phone in a shopping centre asking, “Are you on your way to Arkansas?” prompting this slow, sparse fingerpicked, fiddle and trilling mandolin blues that sketches an intriguing narrative of betrayal and comeuppance (“Fooled you with his money/Fooled you with his grin/I’m the fool who’s left behind/But he might not always win…I hear he’s back in jail/Me, I’d leave him there to die”) with its Spanish guitar solo playout.
The last of the original material is Trey Hensley and Jutz’s mid-tempo, melancholic reflection on the changing face of the Nashville music industry (“New strings on an old guitar”), Jutz singing lead on Nashville In The Morning as a love letter to the city and its past (“Nashville in the morning/Is still beautiful to me/‘Cause the cranes and the highrises/That ain’t what I see/I see a girl with a guitar/Who’s wrapped inside a dream”).
It ends back at sea with Brace’s dreamy and salty-tinged fingerpicked setting of the John Masefield poem Sea Fever (“I must go down to the sea again/To the lonely sea and sky/And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”) that calls to mind the quieter reveries of Stan Rogers.
All in all, this is an unfussy, highly appealing album by two consummate musicians who have nothing to prove, making music for the joy of it and, in turn, affording that same experience in those who hear it. On an associated note, if you like this, then Jutz is also digitally releasing, via his website, two tracks a month for a year or so of basic song demos, a guitar and vocal, that mostly never saw the public light of day.