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Avg: 4.0 (137 ratings)
- Date Released: April 21, 2009
- Genre: Country/Folk
- Label: Music Road / IODA
Cleaves continues to be the best alt-country singer/songwriter you're not listening to
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We Say...
Cleaves' previous album, 2006's Unsung, was a mixed blessing. It was a Slaid Cleaves album — which is never a bad thing. The trouble was, it wasn't an album of Slaid Cleaves songs. Instead, the Austin-based artist chose to tip his hat to some of his comrades toiling among the legions of criminally underrated sing-songwriters.
In a remotely sane or just world, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away would see Cleaves finally escaping this peer group, and basking in the sort of mainstream regard accorded Ryan Adams or Steve Earle. It may count against Cleaves that he does several things brilliantly, as opposed to just one thing reliably, and "Everything You Love. . ." is a characteristically diverse tour-de-force: Cleaves can be funny (the Haggard-esque saloon-bar singalong "Tumbleweed Stew"), lachrymose (the Guy Clark-alike "Cry") and angry ("Beautiful Thing" is a savagely articulate protest song that evokes both the anger of John Prine and the sarcasm of Todd Snider).
As ever, it's necessary to make the effort to meet the chronically modest Cleaves at least halfway to his own terms: his songs disdain crass hooks, but his melodies are insidious and meticulously crafted — check the way the vocals and the violin play off each other on "Green Mountains And Me". Similarly, Cleave realizes that one well-tuned observation is worth a dozen rimshot zingers: "Hard To Believe", a dispatch from a small town in Milwaukee, marvels at the miraculous in the everyday with an economy and acuity worthy of Springsteen. -
They Say...
It is odd that Slaid Cleaves has allowed a bad but wildly popular novelist like Stephen King to write the liner notes for his album Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, since, as a songwriter, he far more closely resembles a good but much less popular short-story writer like Raymond Carver. Of course, when a famous person offers to write an appreciation of you, it's hard to refuse, at least from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately and inevitably, the notes are written in King's semi-literate style; at least they're enthusiastic. Nevertheless, Cleaves continues to make like a Southwest Raymond Carver on Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, his first album of largely new material in five years. People on life's fringes -- including a high-school dropout, a cowboy turned drug runner and illegal-alien smuggler, a woman whose husband is away at war, another woman who's abused by her husband and takes her revenge with a gun, and an executioner recalling the days of public hangings -- tell their stories or have them told by the songs' narrators, sung in Cleaves' drawling tenor. Love and money always seem to run out, and violence is never far away. Drinking and drugging occur frequently. Life is hopeless, but people continue to live, at least for a while. Cleaves is particularly incensed about the wars that are luring young Americans away to be killed, maimed, or psychologically devastated, such that the political side of his work begins to recall Steve Earle. But it is the personal impact he is concerned with primarily. The stories are told over attractive folk/country/rock arrangements, which to some extent ameliorate the gloom. But these are not Stephen King-like stories of harmless fantasy-horror. They are tales of dead-end desperation told with the unflinching precision of Raymond Carver. Too bad Carver died 20 years too early to write his appreciation of Slaid Cleaves.
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| 01. |  |
Cry |
3:51 |
|
| 02. | |
Hard to Believe |
3:43 |
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| 03. | |
Beyond Love |
3:43 |
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| 04. | |
Green Mountains and Me |
3:44 |
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| 05. | |
Run Jolee Run |
4:05 |
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| 06. | |
Dreams |
4:14 |
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| 07. | |
Black T-Shirt |
3:14 |
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| 08. | |
Tumbleweed Stew |
3:40 |
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| 09. | |
Twistin' |
4:40 |
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| 10. | |
Beautiful Thing |
3:16 |
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| 11. | |
Temporary |
3:02 |
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11 Total Tracks, 41:12 Total Length
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Credits
- Slaid Cleaves - Organ // Slaid Cleaves - Organ // Slaid Cleaves - Producer // Slaid Cleaves - Producer // Slaid Cleaves - Rattle // Slaid Cleaves - Rattle // Gene Elders - Fiddle // Steve Foley - Horn (English) // Gurf Morlix - Organ // Gurf Morlix - Guitar (Acoustic) // Gurf Morlix - Bass // Gurf Morlix - Guitar (Electric) // Gurf Morlix - Vocals (Background) // Gurf Morlix - Producer // Gurf Morlix - Engineer // Gurf Morlix - Mixing // Gurf Morlix - Lap Steel Guitar // Gurf Morlix - Guitar (12 String Electric) // Gurf Morlix - Guitar (Resonator) // Gurf Morlix - Guitar (Baritone) // Fred Remmert - Mastering // Rick Richards - Drums // Michael OConnor - Guitar (Acoustic) // Brian Jones - Drums // Stewart Myers - Organ // Stewart Myers - Bass // Stewart Myers - Engineer // Trish Murphy - Vocals (Background) // Lars Göransson - Mixing // Rod Picott - Guitar (Acoustic) // Charles Arthur - Piano // Charles Arthur - Guitar (Electric) // Charles Arthur - Producer // Charles Arthur - Wurlitzer // Billy Bright - Mandolin // Karen Cleaves - Photography // Dan Blakeslee - Cover Art // Stephen R. King - Liner Notes // Stephen R. King - Author
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