ROD PICOTT
Hang Your Hopes On A Crooked Nail
Welding Rod Records

www.rodpicott.com
 

Some songwriters adopt a blue-collar persona. For Picott, a former sheetrock worker, it’s an honest voice. After growing up in Maine with chum Slaid Cleaves (with whom he penned the title track to Slaid’s 2000 CD Broke Down), Picott too has moved to Austin. There’s no regionalism in his writing – just working- class issues.

Picott offers a low-key delivery of intense lyrics. One song is devoted to a 1965 Ford Falcon on its last legs. Another slow-tempo piece’s quiet hook, “all the broken parts” (which sums up the CD’s overall theme), turns an auto into a metaphor for the human soul.

In Picott’s songs, when loved ones sing, they’re out of tune or don’t know the words. “Milkweed” is a fond but clear-eyed elegy for his father, whom the title track to Rod’s previous disc, Welding Burns, also portrayed. (A co-write with Cleaves, it’s also, to my mind, the best track on Slaid’s recent CD, Still Fighting the War.) Amanda Shires co-wrote “I Might Be Broken Now” with Picott as her pre-Jason Isbell relationship with him headed for the cliffs.

Picott’s characters dream of a way out of a dead-end life in a small-minded small town. Depending on how you interpret one line, there’s arson amid the fantasy of heading “where no one knows my name” if only he can come up with the guts and gasoline. Long ago in “All Along the Watchtower” Bob Dylan wrote, “’There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief.” Picott’s characters are neither jokers nor thieves, but they seek the same.

— Bruce Sylvester