O'Brien is the "Total Package" - multi-instrumentalist, honest songwriting, top-shelf musicianship

CD Review by Jeff Trippe

Tim O’Brien’s new disc, Chameleon, is a solo project, but it is not the introspective and cryptic sort of recording, which many other iconic musicians ultimately cough up.  It is another openhearted, openhanded offering from a man who clearly respects and cares about his listeners.  Although he goes it alone, for the most part, on his far-flung tours these days, he is an artist who seems to invite us to make the musical journey with him.  Frankly, we would be foolish to turn him down.

Chameleon is an important leg along the way.  Since O’Brien broke ground in 1978 with the bluegrass band Hot Rize, it has been plain that he is a talented songwriter, a warm and powerful vocalist, and a picker of the first order.  This new release, created in the garage studio of ace engineer Greg Paczosa, proves that he is still all of those things:  the songs are intelligent and funny, the singing impeccable, and any stringed instrument – guitar, banjo, mandolin, bouzouki, fiddle – suddenly comes sparklingly to life in O’Brien’s hands.  And yet, in another way, it’s just Tim.

For instance, “Father Forgive Me” is a simple man’s perspective on the turns his life has taken: 

Well, I had me friends in a big ol’ band,

They were lookin’ for a fiddler to lend his hand,

Had all the girls and the cocaine, too,

I got out my rig, showed ‘em all I knew,

Took out the fiddle, played all I knew.

I never got that gig even though I tried,

It’s just as well, I might have died…

It’s an episode from an itinerant musician’s life, but it also describes a situational irony we have all experienced – that wonderment at how we got from way over there to way over here.  In a similar tone, with “Get Out There and Dance,” while somehow eluding the potential for cornpone, the writer urges us to embrace life’s chances, to get off the couch, to live and to love. 

Structurally and technically, the listener could not ask more of a solo performance.  O’Brien’s chord structures and tunes are infectious, and once again, his string accompaniments and lead parts are clean, sometimes stunning, and yet never cluttered or out of place.  Who would ever have imagined that the bouzouki would become such an integral part of an American folksinger’s “rig”?

If O’Brien were a baseball player, he would be what scouts call the “total package.”  He has played it all from bluegrass to Irish to blues to country and back again; he has traveled the world with a guitar on his back; his songs have been covered by big-time moneymakers; he has been an integral part of important historical recordings including Songs From the Mountain and a tribute to Blind Alfred Reed; he has played in gyms and in great halls, and he even won a Grammy award in 2006.  On Chameleon, he seems to be the sole master of any given musical moment, and yet we get the strong sense that he is still developing, experimenting, still in the summer of his growth – a hopeful sign for those of us also now in our fifties.  Yet, beyond any of that, if you’ll hear this disc all the way through, you will also begin to know the man – his wit, his loves, his fears.

A visit to O’Brien’s website (www.timobrien.net) manages to inspire that same sense of intimacy.  His road journals are candid and friendly, and there are pictures and information about his interesting array of acoustic instruments (it’s not a “collection,” per se – these things have as many miles on them as O’Brien himself).  Here is a typical commentary:

My sister Mollie taught me that the difference between a violin and a fiddle is you don't spill beer on a violin. This is a German factory fiddle from 1922, but they put a label inside to make it seem Italian. There's no maker named Micelli, but I've owned two of his fiddles. I got them both in my home town of Wheeling, West Virginia. The other one came from my aunt Katrine, and has a whole story with it - too long to go into here - that has to do with hitch-hiking, Patty Hurst, and falling off a stool.

Tim O’Brien is presently on tour in the United Kingdom.  He’ll head for California this summer, but he will be back in New England, at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass, on Oct. 30th this year.