ERIC TAYLOR • SCUFFLETOWN (Eminent, five flowers (the maximum))

By John Conquest, Third Coast Music http://thirdcm.homepage.com

Spooky isn’t quite the operative word here. Taylor’s voice is spooky, his songs are spooky, his guitar playing is spooky and his sparse production and arrangements are spooky, so the cumulative effect is beyond spooky Along with Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Taylor was a major figure in Houston’s thriving singer-songwriter scene in the 70s, but after making Shameless Love in 1981, he withdrew from music for over a decade, though his influence, as they freely acknowledge, pervaded the development and work of Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle.

Twenty years later, given Blaze Foley ’s untimely death and David Rodriguez’s voluntary exile, Taylor remains the last great undiscovered Texas singer-songwriter. This despite two exceptional CDs, 1995’s Eric Taylor (this man is so talented he could even make a good, if overproduced, album on Watermelon) and 1998’s Resurrect on Koch. Whether or not third time is the charm, this is quite definitely Taylor’s best album, an edgy, unsettling collection from, as G reg Johnson of Oklahoma City’s Blue Door aptly describes him, “the master short story writer disguised as a songwriter,” whose struggles with personal demons clearly inform his work but who has the intelligence and grace to make his songs personal but not overpersonal, demanding but not overdemanding.

Like Townes Van Zandt, whose Where I Lead Me and Nothin’ Taylor chose for the first covers he’s ever recorded (the album also includes a medley of Willie McTell’s Delia and Taylor’s own Bad News), deceptive simplicity conceals levels of complexity, apparent non sequiturs are charged with meaning, the seemingly clear-cut becomes enigmatic, the opaque becomes manifest. To put it more simply, this is a keeper, an album which will reveal a little more of itself, and maybe Taylor, with every playing. Preternatural, that’s the word I’m looking, though brilliant would be pretty good too.