CD reviews for July 3, 2009

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music critic
• Published: Jul 3, 2009

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Brad Paisley
AMERICAN SATURDAY NIGHT
Like Bruce Springsteen, the star with the everyman touch who’s been called a country singer from New Jersey, country star Brad Paisley expresses common experiences in exceptional ways. Technically, Paisley isn’t a great singer, but his understated sincerity gets his well-crafted lyrics across with affecting clarity. He can throw a party, too, just as effectively as he tells a story about a hard lesson learned.

Paisley’s in party mode for title track “American Saturday Night,” a celebration of the American melting pot that opens with a three-guitar attack expertly played by the star of the show. “It’s a French kiss, Italian ice, Spanish moss in the moonlight,” he sings over a music track deftly derived from Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits. Paisley sugar coats the bitter pill of a devastating breakup in the heartrending but fun “Everybody’s Here” and then rebounds in “Then,” blissfully confident about a love that he’s sure will never end.

Paisley unleashes his guitar chops again for the perfectly timed summertime song, “Water.” He plays another great guitar intro for the uplifting “You Do The Math,” a song in which he courts a hard-to-get girl who he knows is just right for him. Paisley also produces a classic country song, “No,” co-written with a classic country artist, Bill Anderson, before stomping the accelerator again for the racing, train beat-driven “Catch All The Fish.”

Paisley’s probably too enlightened to think of himself as competing with his country peers. Nevertheless, by striving to top himself he’s created an album so high-spirited, sweeping and superbly realized that probably few can match it. 

George Harrison
LET IT ROLL
During his decade-plus with the group that became the biggest pop act in the world, the late George Harrison got labeled the quiet Beatle. True, most of the songs that appeared on the Beatles LPs and 45s were the brilliant work of Harrison’s prolific singer-songwriter band mates, John Lennon and McCartney, but youngest Beatle Harrison was a bright spirit, too, not to mention an essential part of Beatles chemistry. By 1969, he even recorded his first Beatles A-side, “Something,” a ballad performed and praised by none other than Frank Sinatra, though Sinatra mistakenly credited Lennon and McCartney as the song’s composers.  

All things must pass, even the Beatles. Newly solo, Harrison took a surprising early lead among the ex-Beatles by releasing his three-LP debut in 1970. Co-produced by Phil Spector, All Things Must Pass set the tone for Harrison’s subsequent work, a discography that blends tunesmith savvy, beautiful attention to sonic detail and, a rarity in pop music, spirituality.

Let It Roll, a new, 19-track collection of Harrison songs, gets it title from a lesser-known All Things Must Pass track, “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll).” Like so much of Harrison’s work, it’s a gorgeous song that, as CD booklet writer Warren Zanes notes, blurs the line between pop song and prayer. Let It Roll’s other examples of transcendent pop include another All Things Must Pass track, the pious “My Sweet Lord”; the plucked-strings filled “Any Road,” from Harrison posthumous 2002 album, Brainwashed; and soaring “This Is Love,” from 1987’s Cloud Nine.

Harrison’s Monty Python- and Peter Sellers- and the Goons-inspired humor filled his songs, too. It’s heard in “Cheer Down” (co-written with pal Tom Petty); the 1987 hit, “Got My Mind Set On You”; and the perfectly orchestrated glance at Harrison’s Beatles past, “When We Was Fab.”

As this gorgeous collection reveals, Harrison was fab in and out of the Beatles.