There’s something to be said for the type of country music that sounds as if, should you stray too far off the beaten track and step into the wrong honky-tonk, you’d best be packing.
That’s the world the title track here inhabits. “Down near Alamosa,” goes its first line, as the fiddle wails like a warning from the roadside. The inference is clear enough: you’d best be careful.
I don’t know much about Colorado. Hell, I didn’t even know Alamosa was in the state until I Googled it, but I do know a quintessentially American road record when I hear one, and that is exactly what Erik Stucky has provided here.
Perhaps that should not be a surprise. Stucky picked up his first mandolin at the age of eight, and there is a lifetime of music in these songs. Away from his solo work, he has built a reputation as an in-demand multi-instrumentalist, contributing to recordings and touring with others, as well as sharing stages across the United States and Europe with the likes of John Oates, America, Jim Messina, Jamie O’Neal, John McEuen and The Wood Brothers. In other words, this is not someone trying on roots music for size. This stuff is in his bones.
“Night Train” is as big as the prairies as she goes off to New Orleans. More mellow, perhaps more resigned than the opener, it still carries that sense of distance, movement and escape. Yet it is “Jealous Of The Wind” that really confirms this as troubadour work of the highest order.
A quite brilliant song, rich in metaphor and high on skill, it is a hymn to freedom and a love song all wrapped up in one. There is something effortless about the way Stucky writes, as though these songs have drifted in from somewhere beyond the horizon and he has simply been wise enough to catch them.
The first line of “Because You’re Right” — “you once said I’m too free, but in my mind there’s no such thing” — underlines it, but not as much as the chorus: “because you’re right, doesn’t make me wrong.” That is the sound of a road dog to the last. A man who knows the leaving might hurt, but knows staying would hurt more.
The last one changes the vibe. For all the Tex-Mex stylings of “Crying Side Of You,” though, there is no happiness here. “You can trust a liar never tells the truth,” he opines, and you imagine he knows that from somewhere real.
That, ultimately, is why these five songs work so well. They feel lived-in rather than written. They carry dust on their boots, whiskey on their breath and just enough danger in the shadows. Erik Stucky has made a quite brilliant EP here, one that understands country music not as an affectation, but as a map: roads, regrets, escape routes and all.
Rating 9/10
