Ryan Bingham - Fear and Saturday Night (2015)

Ryan Bingham needed peace and quiet to write. He relocated to the mountains of California, embracing the solitude to dig down deep and craft his most powerful album yet, 'Fear and Saturday Night.' Bingham was actually in the back of a van when he wrote 'The Weary Kind,' the centerpiece of the film 'Crazy Heart' starring Jeff Bridges. It earned him an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy, and skyrocketed him into the spotlight. Recorded mostly live with a brand new backing band with producer/engineer Jim Scott, 'Fear and Saturday Night' opens with "Nobody Knows My Trouble," a loping, autobiographical ballad about trying to outrun a painful past and finding redemption both in the strings of a guitar and in hitting the road with the love of your life. "Adventures Of You And Me" is a slide-guitar and mariachi-tinged barn-burner about a pair of misfits who travel the country together, while "Island In The Sky" again picks up the theme of travel as a means of salvation and escape. Bingham faces down his past with a poetic grace throughout the album. "Radio" is about coping with a darkness that doesn't want to let go, searching to make sense of your life and the strength to stay on the right track, while "Hands of Time" deals with accepting what's behind you and moving forward. On "Broken Heart Tattoos," a wistful waltz written to an unborn child, he imagines what kind of parent he'll become." Perhaps the most affecting moment on the album arrives in the title track, when Bingham sings, "I don't fear nothin' except for myself / So I'm gonna go out there and raise me some hell." 'Fear and Saturday Night' is the most authentic, personal, and deeply moving portrait of that man we've heard yet.