Artist: Don Henley
Album: Cass County
Bitrate: 230kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Capitol
Genre: Country
Size: 109.22 megs
PlayTime: 1h 02min 47sec total
Rip Date: 2015-09-25
Store Date: 2015-09-25
Track List:
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01. Bramble Rose 4:31
02. The Cost Of Living 3:40
03. No, Thank You 3:45
04. Waiting Tables 4:48
05. Take A Picture Of This 4:06
06. Too Far Gone 3:43
07. That Old Flame 4:25
08. The Brand New Connection Waltz 3:20
09. Words Can Break Your Heart 3:40
10. When I Stop Dreaming 3:06
11. Praying For Rain 5:00
12. Too Much Pride 3:45
13. She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune 3:15
14. Train In The Distance 4:47
15. A Younger Man 4:20
16. Where Am I Now 2:36
Release Notes:
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Don Henley was country before it was cool, long before he was a singing,
drumming and songwriting member of the Eagles. Cass County, his first solo album
in 15 years, is named after the East Texas plains where Henley, now 68, grew up
amid farming, oil rigs and the Southern radio crossfire of blues, gospel and
honky-tonk music that produced rock & roll. Henley alludes to those roots and
ideals in his true grit here ù 11 original songs of working-stiff portraiture,
broken-love autopsy and sunset-years judgment ù along with a handful of
rich-soil covers. They include the Louvin Brothers' 1955 hit "When I Stop
Dreaming," Jesse Winchester's rustic 1970 jewel "The Brand New Tennessee Waltz,"
and the psychedelic-prairie waltz "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune," originally a
1966 single by Jesse Lee Kincaid.
A whole record of that rewind would have been an instructive pleasure. Instead,
Henley has made an album of quietly defiant pure-country modernism. Written and
produced with Stan Lynch, the original drummer in Tom Petty's Heartbreakers,
Cass County is meticulously crafted, sharply written and absolutely free of
neo-country additives like reheated Seventies-rock bombast and Twitter-verse
vernacular. The single mother slinging hash in "Waiting Tables," the farmer
staring at the sky in "Praying for Rain" and the overdue divorce at the center
of "Take a Picture of This" are all framed by a rich, vintage minimum of
strumming, steel-guitar tears and straightforward harmonies. "It's the oldest
form of suicide," Henley warns in the saloon blues "Too Much Pride," the kind of
morality lesson you'd expect on an Eagles LP ù except Henley cuts it more like
the seasoned hardass romanticism of Merle Haggard.
Haggard actually shows up on this album, taking a verse in "The Cost of Living"
with brawny authority. But everything in the music serves the sting and solace
in the tales. That goes for Henley's parade of celebrity guests too. Many ù like
Alison Krauss, Trisha Yearwood and Lucinda Williams ù serve in the backing
chorales. Those who get a shot up front keep it short and poised. When Mick
Jagger, a rare outright rocker here, takes a verse after Miranda Lambert in the
cover of Tift Merritt's "Bramble Rose," it is with a striking restraint miles
from his hayseed exaggeration in the Rolling Stones' "Far Away Eyes." A bonus:
the plaintive breeze of his harmonica work.
It's worth remembering that the Eagles were really a singer-songwriters' band
with country flair. Thus the real stars on Cass County are Henley's finely
etched walking wounded in songs like "That Old Flame" and "Words Can Break Your
Heart," and his aged-like-whiskey tenor, which confronts and comforts with equal
measure, sometimes in the same scene. Henley evokes his own wild days, after he
left Texas, in the hard twang and speed of "Where I Am Now": "I've done some
foolish things/And I've been downright stupid." But, he contends, "I made it
through somehow/And I like where I am now." Which, on this album, is home.