Tom Ovans - Crows in the Corn (2020)

Sparse, raw and recorded in analog to a 4-track, his cracked, dry and dusty voice seasoned with life and time, at times evocative of Dylan at his early best, Crows in the Corn, is Tom Ovans 14th album and first in six years. An unfiltered classic of American folk-blues filled with dark stories of the road, of redemption, losers, survivors and ghosts that haunt, opening with just the voice, harmonica and guitar capturing a tribal rhythm for Going Back Home, a song that carries a contemporary resonance of alienation and exclusion with its line about “Going back home before they build that wall”.

Another blast of harmonica colours the simply picked Spaghetti Blues, a song about struggling against the odds and indifference (“Been fighting the wind but it’s blowing still…Coughing up a lung but no one gives a bleep”), be that of an artist looking for an audience or anyone who just doesn’t fit.

Her is more of a doomed romance affair, though, as he sings about “standing on the corner/With a love I’m trying to hold/But I know that I cannot/I got to let go”, it could equally be about a lover or making music your life, especially given its reference to Eric Andersen’s Violets Of Dawn.

One of the strongest Dylan echoes comes with the talking-blues styled Rolling And Rambling, a snapshot of a relationship that may have come to a natural end (“I don’t how we ever made it this far/I was just that skinny girl out on the street/You were that boy with that crazy car”/I said, “That car was something wasn’t it/It sure took us for a lot of rides”/She just shook back her hair and when she did/I could see the highway still in her eyes”).

Again just Ovans and a guitar, the title track is another snapshot of tale of two lovers whose story has reached an end (“Now I see you dancing in the light/How I long just to hold you tight/But too many men too many years/Too many lies too many tears”), Apocalyptic Dawn continuing with a theme of being surviving being dumped (“Well her hair was kind of red/And her eyes were kind of blue/And she left me for dead/All along this avenue”), apparently by spending the night walking it off “Until I saw the light”.

The slow waltz, harmonica backed cowboy campire feel of Land Of The Shakes refers to the area around Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee which was created by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, the song lamenting how once “There was bears and deer everywhere/And the rivers and the streams all ran clear”. But, then, man came along “and took all he could take” as, speaking of the struggle to make a living (“never is enough is what you make”) he dreams of what was with “Elvis standing by the Graceland gates/Singing ‘Peace In The Valley’”.

Clocking in at just over six minutes, the raspy skeletal blues Hard Road Mama pretty much describes itself in the title as it recounts life in the belly of the beast (“There’s riots in the west up and down the avenue/The radicals are on the run and the government on the move/Eyes in the sky, boots on the ground/You speak truth to power boy you know you’re trouble bound”). But then it’s back to the wide open home on the range country feel with the descending scales of On A Greyhound, another song about not quite finding the right moment (“I come to early for the future baby/Come too late for the past”), be it playing a guitar to folk who don’t listen or moving on from a relationship “for some places I need to be going” because “in this world we live in baby/Sometimes love just won’t do”.

Doomed love is there again in the last of the new material, the terrific The Mighty Sea, opening on harmonica and unfolding the Dylanesque folk ballad of the man from old Brighton who “grew up fast and he grew up hard/On those streets of poverty/And he dreamed of a day he would sail away” and the girl who stole his heart “as she moved through the fair…And the light it danced upon her hair”.

However, while they “promised each other forever more”, in the classic tradition of such socially mismatched romances, her parents see to it that he’s forced to flee, sailing the seas, drowning is pain in booze and whores while she weds a man from her own society while never forgetting her first true love. All of which winds up poignantly with Ovans inserting himself into the narrative, playing The Girl From The North Country in some bar on Bleeker Street while an old man sits in the corner with tears in his eyes.

The final track revisits one of his best-known songs, the tender, heartbreaking Avenue Of the Americas (aka Sixth Avenue), a song about a chance lovers’ reunion and the paths their lives have taken them down. Originally from 2001’s Still In This World, it may start off echoing the abovementioned Dylan number with the line “She once was a true love of mine” but, slower and more grained by experience than the first time around, comes to sound like a forgotten Mickey Newbury diamond as he asks “How many crosses on the road to Calvary/Before the night brings us peace/Before the day we are free”. I’ve followed Ovans since the early days, heard his voice grow raspier and grittier over the years, heard him rocking out with a band and nakedly introspective with just an acoustic guitar, and he’s never disappointed, never failed to impress with his ability to either fire up the heart or cut to the emotional quick. He may never get the wide recognition and audience he deserves, but albums like this are the reason why some of us get out of bed in the morning.