It’s easy and often tempting to apply the Folk genre label to any song played on an acoustic guitar and sung in a somewhat rustic manner; it’s easy to offhandedly label the singers of such music “singer-songwriters.”  The utmost Folk purists will refuse to grant the Folk classification to any music that has not survived at least a couple generations of bona fide oral dissemination and transmutation: if a song hasn’t been picked up and sung by other (non-commercial!) singers in a folksong’s natural context of occurrence—these days a coffeehouse or a bonfire gathering perhaps—then it isn’t folk.  

Music Man, 2009

Upon first listen to the first few tracks of Music Man, the music might seem tiredly unoriginal and lacking any extraordinary insight.  But as the album unfolds and the songs build upon each other, you realize that the songs that at first seemed to be misfires (I think primarily of the title track, which essentially declares nothing other than that the singer is indeed a music man) are merely the folksinger’s ethos—to again provide a Dylan quote, “Anything worth thinking about is worth singing”—at work.  A folksinger writes about any subject under the sun, and so some songs will be heavier than others, some lighter.  To the folksinger, both are equally valid.

Keaveny’s songs are pervaded by an air of restless movement.  In “Goin’ to Arizona” he builds a wary yet romantic expectation of the imminent trip to Arizona (surely only the most recent trip of many recently undertaken) by recounting the recent pasts of two men making the trip with him; the effect of recounting Bobby’s (“my brother and an angel”) and David’s (“a conman from Milano, Italy”) tales is to give their next trip, the next chapter in their multifarious stories, an anything-could-happen air of romance. 

What would such a collection of songs be without some type of social commentary?  “Most Americans, they don’t get around/Just maybe over to the very next big town/Too far in debt or afraid or just not curious enough to cross that line/To another world and to another time,” he sings in “Livin’ In A Dream,” a song about the willful blindness (“Everybody’s a pawn of a bigger game”) of most of the world’s inhabitants to the “Snakes up top inventin’ more lies/Each government growin’ more ‘n’ more centralized.”  These words come in the “talking blues” format that listeners of Woody Guthrie, Dylan, and Townes Van Zandt will be familiar with, and if not for the contemporary references to the Iraq War, this song would be indistinguishable from any of the talking blues songs of any of the aforementioned folksingers.

To give every song the depth of discussion it deserves would obviously take too long.  Suffice it to say that Music Man is rich and diverse, deeply personal yet expansively encompassing, rough yet elegant.  Whether the choicest songs here are accidental brilliance or painstaking song craft could not matter less: the end result (which, of course, really is no end at all) will undoubtedly delight and inspire singers and listeners alike.

By Evan Butts