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CON'T:
Working in an uncluttered acoustic narrative style, occasionally backed by string quartet, he unfolds his dusty tales of America and its disenfranchised, wanderers, dreamers and heartbroken.
The album opens with California (Rutherford Hayes in the Morning), a reminiscence of the first President ever to visit the State, an historic memoir that unfolds into a passing of an era lament for the end of the reconstruction’s innocence of golden lemonade and the dawn of an industrial century. A Crooked Line places itself in the mouth of a second-generation immigrant haunted by the ghosts of the past, their seed scattered from what was once a poor man’s El Dorado into ‘this vast expanse of Laundromats and taco stands.’
Another character song, Late For Dinner recounts the tale of a Vietnam veteran who, scarred by his experiences, walked out on his family but told, not in his person, but from the perspective of the wife left behind.
Trailed by the album’s only instrumental, Koreatown interweaves the stories of two people seeking different escapes from the oppression of LA as “the world comes crashing down.”
Elsewhere I Lost A Day To The Rain is a playful number that makes mention of the only three characters in Western civilization to be directly linked with rain (Noah, Ben Franklin, Gene Kelly), The River Where She Sleeps is a cover of banjo player Dave Carter’s sunny optimism portrait with its sad sting, There Should Be Highways casts its gaze back to new frontier days and a wanderer’s prophetic dream for a quicker way to go west while the album closes with I Can Get There From Here, a head held high dedication to those who took part in the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, its string quartet arrangement embracing influences both classical and Afro-Cuban.
The most poignant moment though has to be Bryant St, a hint of Paul Simon that takes Purpose into heartbreaking autobiographical territory, his journey to the 40 year old grave of the half-sister he never knew, a little girl who wandered off and drowned in a swimming pool.
Like every great storyteller, Purpose cuts deep to the humanity within his listener, making his story theirs. —Mike Davies
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