CD Review

Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer
Tanglewood Tree
(Signature Sounds, 2000)

Tanglewood Tree is a masterpiece, pure and simple. Dave Carter's "postmodern mythic American" songwriting is, on this album, virtually flawless, from the opening song "Happytown," which welcomes you to their mythic wild wild west America, to the haunting guitar and vocal melodies of "Farewell to Bitter Root Valley." The title track is an instant classic, as impossible to clear out of your mind as the undergrowth of Eden. And it feels as ancient:

love is a tanglewood tree, in a bower of green
in a garden at dawn
fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings
and the music is gone
young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide
when the red summer poppies bloom
but love is a trackless domain, and the rumor of rain
in the late afternoon

The song contrasts old wisdom about love's inevitable disappointments with the intoxicated idealism that young lovers continually bring to their encounters. It's Spenser's Bower of Bliss, as dawn turns to afternoon and finally night, summer winds down into autumn, and all love's illusions stand revealed - if you can make out the truth in the tangle of voices.

In sharp contrast to this intricate Elizabethan song is the post-modern "Crocodile Man." This southern gothic rap is sung-spoken by Tracy Grammer, her voice electronically processed (using a paper cup) to a grating edge as she relates fantastic wanderings among carnies and "hicktown princes" that eventually take her back home where:

mama raised me on riddles and trances
fatback, channel-cat, lily white lies
rocked my cradle in a jimmy-crack fancy
never met papa and i never asked why

In the middle are an assortment of slow and fast ballads that weave their story spells. The "one-eyed witch/in a world gone blind" of "Walkin Away from Caroline" recalls Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne." And "The Mountain" recalls Woody Simmons' old Oregon songs. I have not been able to stop playing this album. The musicianship is first rate. And while some of the archaic, cowboy-western imagery seems a little affected at times - at least to my eastern ear - Dave Carter is not as much the "Carlos Casteneda" of folk music on this album as he was on his last - almost no trace of that new-age language. Here he has anchored his words in an alternate reality which, if not quite real, at least has the grit of the real world under its fingernails and in its hair. I can't recommend this album enough. -HB