Review of Trouble No More by Darden Smith

I vividly recall buying this album (from a used CD shop in Pasadena) and bringing it back home, putting it into the player, and simply sitting back on the couch realizing that this was the type of music that spoke directly to me. After listening to it once, I had to leave the apartment for an appointment, but I left the CD in the player, the jewel case sitting out on top of it. Jill told me later that when she came home, she saw the new CD, began playing it, and thought the same thing: this is a great album.Ten years later and I still think this is a great album. I can put this album on and listen to every song on it without feeling the urge to press the skip button, and if I'm in the car alone, I'm singing along at full voice. And because of how I remember so vividly when I bought this album, listening to it inevitably reminds me of Los Angeles, the first time I had lived outside of Texas. In Austin, Darden Smith's home town and mine for five years, I had never gotten into the local music scene, although I did listen to local radio and briefly co-hosted a show on the student-run radio station that had just started. I knew of Darden from a small local hit on KLBJ, a duet with Boo Hewerdine called "All I Want (Is Everything)." But none of that prepared me for *Trouble No More*, which sounded to me, after a year in Los Angeles, like nothing but home itself.The album accomplishes this partly through Darden's slightly accented voice, which has a slight Texas twang, unnoticeable except for the pronounciation of certain words (as compared to, say, the noticeable accents of Lou Ann Barton, Richard Thompson, or The Proclaimers). There's a country tinge to the music as well, which mainly relies on Darden's acoustic guitar as its main feature. But most of all, I think of home because of the lyrics, which reference a combination of religion, settings, situations, and people that I know intimately.The album starts off with a slowly building song called "Midnight Train," that begins with a repeated acoustic guitar part that sounds a lot like the motion of a train. As the song moves along, it slowly adds more instruments and layers until it drives to the end with locomotive intensity. The lyrics are about lost dreams, brought up by the sound of a midnight train passing by while the narrator lays in bed.The next song, "Frankie and Sue," is one of the most upbeat of Darden's career. Based on a real story of some friends of his who didn't realize that they loved each other until one moved to Hong Kong, it has a bright, bubbly bounce to it that sounds like Brian Wilson meets Lyle Lovett, especially in the nice use of call-and-response background singers.Most of the songs are slower and intimate, internally reflective rather than stories about others. In this album, Darden relies heavily on cliches, which aren't quite as horrible when set to music as they are when you simply read them. He often plays off them, mutating them into something of his own, but not so much in "All the King's Horses," a song where he laments a love affair beyond reconciliation.The most powerful songs on this album are the ones where Darden mixes his down-home sound with the imagery of Christianity, which he does in both the title song and "2000 Years," whose chorus pleads, "Answer my prayers / If there's anyone up there / 'cause 2000 years is a mighty long time / If you're going to call me home, now's the time." In "Trouble No More," the background singers become a church choir that join in assuring us all that "someday...when the burden has lifted / you won't have trouble no more."There are so many great lyrics in here that I have trouble narrowing it down to just a few. In some of my favorite songs, like "Fall Apart at the Seams," the metaphor would have been strained in the ham-handed hands of a big-hat country artist. But Darden seems to be able to keep the analogy in check. For example, "Now I used to have a house on the rock, oh man / but because I just couldn't be satisfied, I took out across the sand. / Now that lack of satisfaction has cost me everything / I lost my rock, and fall apart at the seams." Another writer would have required everything to be about clothes, rather than trying to work it in with an unconnected image, and yet he's able to join them through the implied connection. (In addition, making yet another, somewhat oblique, religious reference -- Jesus said that he would be the rock that the church would be built upon.)Along with "Frankie and Sue" and "Trouble No More," two other songs have a more sprightly feel to them that has been lost in Darden's more recent albums. "Ashes to Ashes" suffers from the same repeated lyrical cliches, but redeems itself in the choir-chorus use like in "Trouble No More" and strikingly original lines like "I lied and I cheated, I marked my cards / Gave into temptation, boys it wasn't that hard. / The most, the most original sin / I did it day after day, time and time again." In "Johnny Was a Lucky One," the narrator reveals that he's envious of his friend who didn't survive Vietnam because all the home town see Johnny in the best light, rather than the narrator who came back to make nothing of himself following the war."Long Way Home" is another story song, where the female protagonist decides to drive a little bit longer before getting home, the implication that maybe she didn't return at all.The album ends with a soft song with some of the best imagery in the album, where the songwriter and his guitar (with a understated harmonica in the background) pair in a most unusual love song. "You soil me, you stain me, I could never come clean / there's a wrinkle on my heart you wouldn't believe." All because the narrator knows that he needs his love, and that only that love could rescue him from the "Bottom of a Deep Well."I'm not sure that others would be as affected by this album as I am (or, I think, Jill is). We all come upon books and music, movies and plays, with our gathered experiences, the baggage of both where we have been and what we've decided to keep from it. For me, though, this is an album that defines me, that offers me solace, and that continues to reward me upon repeated listening.