W&W from C&W

by

Weekly Wit & Wisdom from Country & Western:

Thank you for a life that I’d call happy
Overlooking all that we’ve been through
When it comes to loving I’ve been lucky
Everything I am I owe to you

Thank You for a Life

Kris Kristofferson’s This Old Road is acoustic, quiet; it’s the sound of Austin in the seventies but with the resonance of a man at seventy, looking back. His politics seems as scrambled as his brain was in the old drinking days. (It’s hard to take a song that mixes the tabloid mystery of the Scott Peterson case with – apparently – the Iraq war seriously.) At its best, this quiet album has an old man’s power.

He accepts with a certain pleasure the tendency of a man at that age to turn inward; in “Holy Creation” he pays lipservice to the topical but he really can’t concentrate – his children grab his attention:

I know the story
I read the papers
I see the anger
I feel it too

But when I see the wonder
In the smiles of my children
It reminds me of dreams
Worth coming true