Darrell Scott
Album: 10:Songs Of Ben Bullington
Label: Full Light
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.darrellscott.com

This latest collection from one of country music’s finest contemporary songwriters, Darrell Scott, focuses instead entirely on his own interpretations of the songs of a fellow-songwriter, the late Ben Bullington of Montana (a country doctor by profession), who died in November 2013 of pancreatic cancer. It’s a set of superbly intimate performances that acutely reflect the intimate nature of the songs, with unadorned self-accompaniments on “some borrowed treasures”; on all but one song, it’s just one instrument at a time, of either the guitar, piano or banjo species. On the opening song, The One I’m Still Thinking About, Darrell even plays Ben’s very own vintage 1933 Martin guitar.

It turns out that Darrell and Ben were friends; they met initially as divorced fathers on a camping trip with their families, and incredibly, Darrell only got to know Ben’s songs in the final year of his life. An iphone recording of one of them (I’ve Got To Leave You Now), which Darrell had sent to Ben himself barely three months before his death, closes this disc. Now there’s a close artistic bond – indeed, the whole disc is a powerful example of a recording where a performer gets right inside the songs of a fellow-writer. Darrell considers Ben’s songs perfect examples of “song as literature”, and their soulful poetry and knowing introspection is significantly intense. Particularly so in the case of the aforementioned closing song, which is at once strongly reassuring and quite heartbreaking in that it carries resonances beyond its original precept (a father’s advice to his sons); the raw immediacy of Darrell’s voice in response to the lyric is immensely touching.

But there are so many seriously high-quality songs here; the simple honesty of Ben’s vision is both comforting and disarmingly understated. Any sense of nostalgia is tempered with hindsight and perception – the comparatively straightforward memory-portrait of Thanksgiving 1985 contrasts with the majestic Born In ’55, which somehow manages to draw both comfort and warmth from its sometimes painful recollections, and Darrell’s piano accompaniment on this song is outstanding. His banjo work on Lone Pine is also a highlight, and proves the ideal setting for Ben’s robust referential imagery on this standout track. Aside from the above-mentioned iphone recording and a cut recorded live at a boisterous Texas gig (the acerbic Country Music, I’m Talking to You), the rest of the tracks were recorded at Dirk Powell’s home-cum-studio in Louisiana. Simplicity of execution is the key, and only In The Light Of Day departs from this modus operandi with a fair bit of multitracking – and for me loses its way somewhat. But that’s a minor issue in the scheme of things, where I’m forever in Darrell’s debt for having discovered a major new songwriting voice.

David Kidman