Folk group Eddie From Ohio’s debut album A Juggler on His Blades suggested that the band had its own sound and, in Mike Clem, a songwriter with some interesting things to say, but that they needed to focus to make a cohesive album. Actually Not, their second release, was not that record. Instead, in its sprawling length — 20 songs in 75 minutes — it came off as an attempt to commit to record everything Clem, guitarist Robbie Schaefer, and singer Julie Murphy had written since the first album, whether it was any good or not. Actually, there was a theme of sorts to the record: It was dominated by story songs about pathetic characters, many of whom died, were dead already, wished they were dead, or killed somebody. There were “The Three Fine Daughters of Farmer Brown,” who drowned. There was the “strangler of Baltimore” in “Red Footprints” who got caught because he unknowingly stepped in paint. There was “Ginger Faye” from the University of Virginia who was eaten by a crocodile in Australia. Willie, disregarding “A Very Short Fuse,” got blown up. And “In Paradise,” dead two-year-old Katy writes a postcard to her mother from heaven. But if the lyricists had succumbed to a fatal case of the maudlin, the band members were playing and singing even better as a group, and they were joined by New Grass stalwart Mike Auldridge, who often added country and bluegrass elements to their music. Still, whether Actually Not simply represented a bad patch of songwriting or marked Eddie from Ohio as a bunch of earnest, humorless folkies who copped their stories from the back pages of the tabloids (what might be called “the curse of Harry Chapin”) remained to be seen. – William Ruhlmann