Will Kimbrough

From the playful bravado of the opening cut to the understated finale, a kind of dark variation on "Me and Bobby McGee," Home Away visits a range of musical and lyrical settings. Each of these provides insight into Nashville's Will Kimbrough, whose narrative gifts stand out even among his hometown peers. This variety nods somewhat transparently to the diversity of his influences. It's easy, for example, to catch a whiff of Randy Newman in the delicacy, dark irony, and aching love written into "Champion of the World"; Kimbrough makes this clearer still in his muted piano part, but adds his own flavor with theremin lines that hover in the background. It's possible to imagine Billy Joel declaiming on "Letdown," though Kimbrough switches to a George Harrison flavor during the slide guitar licks on the bridge. And it's even easier to mistake "I Love My Baby" for a John Lennon ode to Yoko Ono. Yet these are all just colors in Kimbrough's rainbow: His overdubbed harmonies evoke Simon & Garfunkel on "Anita O'Day," but everything else about this tribute to a somewhat forgotten jazz singer, from the minimalist eloquence of the words to the ghostly organ fills, reflects his own artistry. A key to Kimbrough is his disinclination to take himself as seriously as each of his influences do. Not one of them could have turned depression into the banjo-tickled, pick'n'grin confessional "Happier." With albums like Home Away in his catalog, Kimbrough seems bound to emerge as an influence to reckon with on his own terms. ~ Robert L. Doerschuk, Rovi