Nashville resident Tim Gartland is not a country singer. He is an unhyphenated modern blues artist; the harmonica, mostly Little Walter- and Charlie Musselwhite-inflected, is his instrument. Though there are discernible influences outside the genre -- country being among them, rock, r&b, soul and folk as well -- they're so subtly integrated into a thoughtfully organic approach that a hyphen before or after the "blues" part of the job description is unnecessary. You've got to be pretty good if you can manage that.

Gartland is also a singer-songwriter but, unlike many, one who composes songs with their own distinct personalities. You won't confuse them, I can assure you. That means he writes with atypical care and precision on top of having a broad gift for the craft. In that sense (as I observed when I reviewed his previous album in this space on 9 March 2019) he reminds me a little of the onetime Village folksinger Fred Neil ("The Dolphins," "Everybody's Talkin'") and, this time around, at passing moments of jazz-blues composer and mordant social critic Mose Allison. Both are gone, and we who remember them miss them.

Possessed like Gartland of a deep-in-the-throat vocal style, Neil had a notable ability to conjure up emotions of a particularly complex, un-cliched sort. (His "Dolphins" at once evokes heartbreak, meditation, nature mysticism, philosophical fatalism and old Southern folksong imagery. Nothing on Truth -- or anywhere else, probably -- matches that.) What Gartland offers is a fresh, pleasingly melodic way of reflecting on life's challenges and frustrations as filtered through a blues sensibility, a thrilling harmonica wail and a terrific band.

"Wish I Could Go Back" brings to mind Neil's inspired manner of reimagining rural blues, taking sentiments that are too-often stale in reconstructed performance and finding the vibrant life yet inside them. "The Thing About the Truth" is an ambitious song, drolly Allison-esque in its dissection of a post-relationship quarrel -- familiar to just about anybody who's ever broken up with somebody -- over the history; the song then expands into a burning indictment of a world that lives on lies, with an allusion to a recent practitioner who took up space in the White House for four long years. And there's some entertaining word play, as in "Cloudy With a Chance of the Blues" for those sufficiently unversed in the genre to think blues is always gloomy. That frolicsome sense of language is on even fuller display in the hilarious "Probably Something."

So much of modern blues drives the tradition to places I personally find less than congenial, in most cases into over-amplified guitar-rock laced with gratuitous exhibitionism. I like my blues conversational, observational, low-keyed and humor-tinged. Gartland has all of those a-plenty.

Still, one question remains: why does the back cover boast "all original material" when "Mind Your Own Business" is the Hank Williams song, even if with an amiably rethought r&b melody, but still the same rueful words, still the same beloved country standard?

[ visit Tim Gartland's website ]