Sometimes I spend months avoiding the songs of Fred Eaglesmith, who was born in 1957 as Fred Elgersma in Guelph, Ontario. Some of them ("Pretty Good Guy") make me laugh, but some ("The Rocket") make me cry. With a few (my favorite song "Cigarette Machine" for example), one listen casts a melancholy quality over my life that can persist for days. There's something about that voice, too, that feels sad and intense, even though Fred never tries too hard.
But sometimes I spend months listening to little else, basking in the great Fred Eaglesmith every day until people start asking me to stop. One reason this is a possibility is that there are something like 20 albums, maybe 300 original songs.
Fred's themes are working-class lives, or lives that have fallen off the working-class train: people who are ill, poor, struggling in systems of oppression that they understand well but can do little to transform. There are foreclosed farms ("Indiana Road" and "Time to Get a Gun") freight trains ("I Like Trains," in short), broke-down vehicles ("I Wanna Buy Your Truck"), environmental and personal destruction ("Cumberland County"), mental illness ("Crazier"), substance abuse and addiction ("Alcohol and Pills"). I don't know how, but Eaglesmith has written, sung, and played my marriages and splits, my descents and recoveries, and my tiny moments of enlightenment too.
I thought I saw your reflection
in a cigarette machine
in a bottle in the gutter
in a window on the street
in a storefront, in a pitcher,
on an old broken TV,
I swear it was you
staring back at me.
When Fred says, "I was wrong" (on "Betty Oshuwa"), he lets it ring, and I feel it fucking hard. But also, you can hear a lot of these as protest songs about the systems in which his characters are struggling.
These are also, many of them, the basic themes of John Prine, whom many artists of the generations that have followed him regard as the greatest country/folk/Americana songwriter. The sound and themes are also tied to Townes van Zandt, a similarly beloved genius. Townes and Prine are gone. Fred’s still here, and has written so many powerful, moving and amusing lyrics, and so many beautiful melodies. "Though she loves the others and she helps them to grow strong, deep inside she pines for the boy that just went wrong."
When he arrived around 1980, Eaglesmith did sound a lot like Prine (check "Comes and Goes" on the playlist below, for example). He basically performed in a bluegrass mode ("Don't Try to Change My Mind"), and his voice was a bit higher than it became as he went along. But the songs were masterful from the start, and if he was doing Prine, it was better than anyone but Prine. Also like Prine, what seemed to drive the whole project was empathy and connection, a real ability to enter the lives of all sorts of people and write from their point of view.
It became a surprising authorship in some ways as it developed. Eaglesmith has tried some sonic experiments, like his samba album Cha Cha Cha. You might get a jangly, rough, acoustic guitar and harmonica arrangement a la early Dylan. But you might get much more produced material featuring background singers, horns, or Farfisa organ. In every case, however, Eaglesmith leaves everything pretty rough: each recording is pointedly unfinished, not perfectly produced. This flaw—his expression and celebration of human imperfection—is the essence of our Fred Eaglesmith, genius.
It's a literary project, and Eaglesmith's oeuvre could be as plausibly connected to writers from Robinson Jeffers to William Faulkner as to musical figures. He's a story-teller, raconteur, and comedian (that's "A Mighty Big Car"), a bard and balladeer. But Eaglesmith hasn’t received what he deserves, reputation-wise. For Eaglesmith is one of the most important songwriters and performers of the last half-century; as good and as meaningful an artist as anyone in country, folk, Americana in his period. But who knows this?
He had a mini-breakthrough in 2009 when Miranda Lambert, the greatest mainline country artist of the period, did his "Time to Get a Gun." I was fired for posting that song on a blog, which redoubled my Eaglesmith commitment. But getting people fired isn’t the sort of recognition that Fred deserves: it should be all halls of fame and sold-out arena farewell tours, Pulitzer prizes and Kennedy Center honors.
I'm the same age as Fred, and concerned that we're both fading a bit. His last full studio album, I think, was Standard in 2017, though he's been trickling out material such as a Christmas album (!) and live albums featuring his wife Tif Ginn on vocals, and running through many of his compositions.
It was a real wrench, but I cut this playlist down to 25. He's recorded a number of these songs several times in different contexts or on different live albums, or in different arrangements. It's surely one of the greatest bodies of work by a living songwriter. These are in no particular order except how I like to hear them unfold.
(1) "Pretty Good Guy"
(2) "Indiana Road"
(3) "Cigarette Machine"
(4) "Comes and Goes"
(5) "Betty Oshuwa"
(6) "I Shot Your Dog"
(7) "Maggie and Me"
(8) "Alcohol and Pills"
(9) "Crazier"
(10) "Trucker Speed"
(11) "Time to Get a Gun"
(12) "Mighty Big Car"
(13) "Careless"
(14) "I Would"
(15) "Cumberland County"
(16) "I Wanna Buy Your Truck"
(17) "A Little Lost"
(18) "The Rocket"
(19) "Don't Try to Change My Mind"
(20) "The Boy That Just Went Wrong"
(21) "Miss Mary Jane"
(22) "Get Your Prices Up"
(23) "Cryin' Yet"
(24) "Freight Train"
(25) "I Like Trains
Previous installments: