South Front Street

Grayson Capps is a songwriter who confronts and seduces listeners with his lyrics. While he observes closely, hes far from neutral. He is always 100-percent invested in his encounters with people, nature, and life experiences, and gives them the same weight as he sends them out as poetic grist from the mill with a canny use of metaphor that relies only on homespun plainspeak to impart what hes learned. He can be confessional, empowering, devastatingly intuitive, wryly humorous, intimate, and angry. His tomes reflect multi-dimensional spiritual and carnal truths in the fabric of everyday life. He adorns them in gritty blues, swampy folk, back porch country, Cajun, and funky roots rock from the fecund soil of his Gulf Coast. For a little more than two decades, Capps has had Grammy- winning producer and engineer Trina Shoemaker as his life partner. She didn’t intend to produce him but it happened eventually. Shes also his witness. Her role on South Front Street: A Retrospective 1997-2019 is integral. Begun as a personal playlist, it doesn’t follow a standard best-of trajectory. Her sequencing of these tracks instead reflects …songs that paint a picture of our life together and reveal a world from the uniquely enchanted, poetic and tormented perspective of Grayson Capps. She remixed a number of tracks to make them fit the mix of the earlier material that she hadn’t worked on to create a single listening experience. The older songs include three from his band Stavin Chain. Its bookends are the poetically tender Americana opener Get Back Up and the heartbreaking narrative Harley Davidson. In between lies the lusty swinging barroom blues of Train Song. May We Love, from 2015s criminally undernoticed Love Songs, Mermaids and Grappa, is haunted; its a slow apocalyptic gospel exhortation to surrender to the power of love itself; during this precarious era, our survival demands it. The storyteller emerges again on Junior & The Old African Queen from 2007s Songbones, a jazz-inflected acoustic narrative with gypsy violins and lonesome harmonica. A Love Song for Bobby Long is the title song to Shainee Gabrels 2004 film of the same name adapted from the novel Off Magazine Street penned by his dad, Ronald Everett Capps, starring Scarlett Johansson and John Travolta. More recent material includes Psychic Channel Blues, a laconic, humorous, easy grooving, and raw backroom strut. Rock N Roll, from the Lost Cause Minstrels, is one of Capps finest songs. Its stark, powerful narrative is couched in shuffling snares, sparse, distorted slide guitar, and Capps trademark gravelly voice. It comes from the murky ether and looks squarely into the foreboding darkness without flinching. As evidenced on South Front Street, Shoemaker shows Capps wide-open, generous heart. It imparts wisdom from lifes hard knocks and its sometimes-questionable blessings with equanimity. In many ways, this doesnt remotely feel like a retrospective, but a new album. Given his lyric gifts and roots forms of musical expression, these songs havent dated an iota: theyre timeless. ~ Thom Jurek