Imagine Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown” expanded into a career. Now imagine that, instead of the Boss and his New Jersey origins, the auteur in question comes from a blue-collar background in Kent County, Michigan – a good long-term vantage point for the deterioration of American industry. With those images in mind, you probably have an approximate vision of Drew Nelson and his third and most recent album Dusty Road to Beulah Land. Though the album is steeped in personal reactions to the recession, what may seem especially germane for the rest of the country right now has been relevant in Michigan for far longer. Drew Nelson, for all his roots credentials and influences, is an ambient artist; he tries to sound out the tone of dilapidation. And, for the most part, he succeeds.
Nelson’s instrumentals ranges from the finger picked bounciness of “Grandmother Moon” to the more driving and purposeful lament of “Stranger”. In either case, what may surprise you most may not be just his compelling guitar play, but the gorgeous brush work on the drums. To the album’s great credit, Terra Nova studios in Austin, TX, gently but assertively mixed all the instruments.
According to Nelson’s website, producer and mixer Jerry Tubb related the following regarding his work on the album: “I’ve worked on a lot of music. Sometimes I get a salvage project; this is a record.” Regardless of how consistent Nelson’s narrative-styled songs were to begin with, Tubb clearly had a great deal of influence on the tenor of the guitars and low attack on the drums. These two characteristics go a long way toward cultivating the ambiance with which Nelson works.
Despite the moonshine warmth of the vocals, it bears mentioning that Nelson’s lyric stories leave something to be desired occasionally. At times I get the sense that he’s trying to imitate Mark Knopfler’s unbelievable track record in writing tunes from a specific person’s point of view. The problem might simply be that Knopfler picks more interesting narratives and narrators. Recall the Dire Straits’ song “Iron Hand” which cynically covers the Battle of Orgreave during the UK miner’s strike in 1984, or even “Money for Nothing”, sung as a snide commentary on MTV by an appliance store employee with whom Knoplfer once had a conversation. Nelson, on the other hand, gives a quiet dignity to all of his subjects – for instance, an old Native American woman in “Grandmother Moon” and a farmer watching the erosion of his land in “Farmer’s Lament” – but stumbles in reaching for the same momentum that define Knopfler and Springsteen’s stories.
The stranger’s claim that he feels “like a stranger in [his] own life” can be taken as an operating thesis of this album. Even so, the album never comes across as unfamiliar or unwelcome, and Nelson has generously prevented us from feeling like strangers to his songs. In that spirit, the incidental hiccups throughout the record never derail the project and in some ways largely contributes to the affects of the album. This is a record, indeed.
words by Miles King