Every time Tom visits, it kinda reminds me of when I was a kid and my grandparents would come into the house with a bag of goodies. He's always got a CD and new music that I've either never heard or haven't paid nearly enough attention to. He's like my own musical Santa Claus. This time it was an EP by Brooklyn based Country Rock artist Willie Breeding. The CD hasn't left my player yet. (I'll give it back soon. I swear!)
I didn't get into the so named country rock until I lived in the South and because of this, I attribute most of the good stuff to Southern musicians. Now that I'm a Northeast girl again, I thought my days of discovering nearby local boys that want to make me rip my jeans and take swigs straight from the bottle while simultaneously crying into it were over. I'm so happy to find I was wrong.
The EP starts out with the title track "Grey Skies". I know we're all sick of the descriptive musician batter but hear me out on this little bit of cake mix. Picture Rufus Wainwright after a three week bender, standing out in the rain with a beat up cowboy hat hanging halfway off his head and holding his own beating heart in both hands while trying to play an old acoustic guitar thats seen so many better days with his teeth! Ok. That didn't quite get it. It's more like, Ryan Adams but with real sadness and swagger. These aren't fabricated love songs, they're real and if you can get past the sweetness of his voice, you can feel that he means it. Breeding's songs are chuck full of life and sadness and the two mix perfectly. Lyrics like "I know where to find you/and I know where you've been/and you're not worth the trouble you get in", collimate exactly what we look for in a sweet country folk ballad, simple and heart picking.
I'm looking forward to picking up his full length album Cheap Vodka Rain very soon. I'm looking at it like a crush. This isn't a love affair that will last forever (I save those for the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle) but for now it fits and it's good enough.
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