Oooo! Right after I did those last postings my mail came in and I finally got one of the highly unavailable Larry Jon Wilson albums! Like half the people I end up posting on here, he is one of the great Nashville poets. And like the ill-fated Blaze Foley, he enjoys special status as a peer favorite who still fails miserably at becoming a commercial success. He wasn’t as self-destructive as Townes, but he matched him in terms of promotional apathy/humility. The liner notes to this 2007 record have him saying
“Many of the people I used to hang out with are famous now, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to say to them ‘I’ve got a song that would work perfect for you.’ When I see them now they have pinchers all around them doing that—people that wouldn’t give them sweat before their fame—and I don’t want to think of myself that way… It’s a soul saving thing for me to know that the people with heart in Nashville care about my music.” And, “You’re looking at a man who’s got a car for the first time in two years.”
God bless him. Now, I’m a huge Rodney Crowell fan—he’s one of the all-time greats—but a guy like this has every bit of the poetry Crowell does, he’s just a shitty businessman and he didn’t marry Johnny Cash’s daughter. I’d encourage everyone who likes theses songs to go and order it from amazon to get poor old LJ some $$$, but since that’s unlikely, he’d probably prefer me to just post the whole album up here so people can hear him.
This album was cut in a hotel room in Perdida Key, a little Island off of Alabama. “Goodbye Eyes,” to me, is one of those songs that just says exactly what it meant to say and says it perfectly. I’m sure I’m not the only one it hits close to home for. Nothing fancy about it, just perfect.
