It's sometimes remarked that these days more songs are being written than ever at any time in history. That's because there are greater quantities of performers composing their own material and nothing else to speak of. It doesn't follow, though, that these are songs of greater quality. Pound for pound, actually, quite the reverse. A case in point:

The late folksinger Dave Van Ronk, taking stock of all the singer-songwriters he knew, noticed how usually only they recorded their own songs. A revered interpreter, Van Ronk vowed to cover some of this (so he judged) neglected material. He did so in a 1994 two-disc release for a long-defunct label. As it happened, aside from non-surprises (Dylan, Ian Tyson, Tom Paxton. Joni Mitchell and the like), many of the lesser known still failed to come to life even under the spell of Van Ronk's magic. They were just as boring as they were when managed by the original artists. I have been a devotee of Van Ronk since I stumbled upon his recordings in college (and I was honored to become friendly with him personally in his last years), but To All My Friends in Far-Flung Places is his one album I never listen to.

As a general principle the creations of performing songwriters (as some prefer to be called, perhaps -- so I'd like to think -- sensing a growing suspicion of "singer-songwriters") feel rootless and weightless. Many are the products of "scenes." An outsider conjures up visions of performers who all know each other; their influences are on each other, all others squeezed out, and the friends dwell amid suffocating mutual congratulation. Meantime, their promoters churn out copy that represents them as heroes of "the roots." (Yes, I'm looking at you, No Depression.)

Maybe that's not fair, or maybe it's fair enough. I readily concede that some exceptional composers exist or at least existed in recent history. One of them, the late Guy Clark, created masterpieces and, just as vitally, a body of solidly craftsmanlike work (e.g. the modest yet oddly stirring "Stuff That Works"). I suspect that aside from his innate talent, Clark took his ultimate lessons from the true vine -- anonymous old folk and blues songs where Dylan says you need to go to learn how to make a song and tell a story. For a guy with an acoustic guitar who hopes to play for an audience, here's where the masters, or their ghosts, live on, awaiting passers-by humble enough to hear and learn.

Based in Austin though a guy who's been around, Terry Klein is now on his third album. I haven't heard the other two, but I infer from remarks he's made that they're different from Good Luck, Take Care. Thus, I render no broad, overarching judgments about anything else in his career. All I know is that this one is something Clark would have appreciated, even if Klein is technically a better vocalist.

In Thomm Jutz, out of the East Nashville songster neighborhood, he has the perfect producer building a sound at once dark and inspiring, with every one of its spare notes exactly where it needs to be to give one the impression, sometimes happy, sometimes harrowing, that these songs have been around for a while and are about something. And they've been around because they're honest and preserve something worth remembering, like the bitterly ironic fate of "The Woman Who Was Lost in the Flood" or of the accumulating toll of time in the melancholy talking blues "What You Lose Along the Way."

I can also imagine Clark's writing the curious meditation "Does the Fish Feel the Knife?" But this is Klein's way of doing it, his own reflection on the greater meaning of the smaller things. Ultimately, he's his own artist, a shrewd, intelligent man, still also like Clark a philosopher and a spinner of tales. Not a single one of Good Luck's 10 cuts falters. It is even, wonder of wonders, shorter (at not quite 40 minutes) than you'd want it to be.

[ visit Terry Klein's website ]