At My Window

AMG Review of At My Window

Kelly McCartney
All Music Guide

Steve Earle once said "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." To make such a bold statement, Earle must have had some evidence to back him up. At My Window will suffice as some of that evidence, no doubt. Whether in sweetly tender allads or honky cowboy ditties, Van Zandt truly wrote of heartache and heartbreak with the best of them. And though his voice lacks the warm honey feel of Lyle Lovett's, he has a down-home, melancholic charm all his own. You need not strain to hear the lonely in his voice. You can so easily picture him sitting by a fire out on a prairie somewhere serenading the full moon. For Van Zandt was of a different breed. In "Buckskin Stallion Blues" he sings "If three and four were seven only, where would that leave one and two?" That's a contemplation for the ages. More a kindred spirit to Hank Williams than Lovett, his life was in his songs. And the world is all the better for that.