RY COODER

Three Chords and the Truth !

Ry Cooder is a national treasure ! He's done it again with another fine release about as different and far from mainstream as you can get. Working from an all inclusive multi genre palette he has fashioned a kind of musical Grapes of Wrath complete with an illustrated story book and a fully developed cast of charactors. Faintly blurring the line between fact, fiction, animal, and human he draws out the commonality of the human condition and the struggles for justice including charactors from J. Edgar to Hank Williams, while the spirits of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King and many others loom large in the background.

Ry Cooder, like Paul Simon, is perhaps one of the few artists who can manage to take concepts based on reality and turn them into fully developed artistic projects in the 'pop music' arena with depth, clarity, and enough musical breadth to sustain a consistant and engaging performance over an entire record. Yes, he's done it again !