Letter to You Review

The method is the selling point and it does deliver something. Five days, everyone in one room, vocals kept from the take, minimal overdubs, and the band sounds better than it has on record in twenty years. The organ and the saxophone have space, the drums breathe, and there is an ease here that the heavily produced albums lost. The trouble is the writing. Three songs are unreleased pieces from 1972 and they are the most interesting things present, because the young writer had images and the older one has statements.

Most of the new material addresses mortality and friendship in language that stays at the level of the abstract noun: the road, the light, the ghosts, the band. Ghosts itself is a good chorus in search of a verse. Last Man Standing, about being the only survivor of his first group, is the one that lands because it is specific. Pleasant company, honest intentions, and thin on songs you will return to.