Noel McKay - Blue Blue Blue (2021)

Blue, Blue, Blue is the third solo album and the first in six years from Lubbock-raised songwriter Noel McKay. The breakup love song title track (“I drove her to the airport with so much weighing on my mind. Said she’d come back soon to claim all of the things she left behind”) was inspired by a dream of scrolling through the internet and coming across Roger Miller singing the chorus, though I could also hear Roy Orbison.

It opens, though, with a touch of Paul Simon on the rolling rhythm The 50 Loneliest Places In The Nation, one of several to feature professional and personal partner Brennen Leigh on guitar and vocal, that is basically a list song of all the vacation stops where “I got my saddest when I went to them and spent some time without you”, allowing some punning allusion and wince-inducing rhymes (“St Louis makes me bluest. St Paul just makes me bawl”) with the last stop designed for live performance as he sings “I suppose, it would be rude if I neglected to include this city that I’m standing in tonight”.

There’s a pleasingly retro feel permeating the album, once that nicely enfolds the lazing jazzy blues of Sleeping In My Car, Dan Walton on saloon bar piano for a number that speaks of the days when homeless and struggling to make his mark, he often slept in the backseat of his 1998 Chevy Cheyenne in various Austin parking lots (“When I wake up with a flashlight in my face the police say I’ve got to park some other place”), occasionally couch surfing at friends.

McKay was first discovered by the late Guy Clark, who became a kind of mentor, and Leigh on mandolin, Flying and Falling is a catchy lolloping co-write about getting back up again after a fall, echoing Kristofferson’s the “goin’ up was worth the comin’ down” as he sings:

“To chart the safest course through life is no kind of life at all/You’ve got to take the chance even though you might be terrified to fall/To see this planet’s curvature and be sure the world is round/Just gliding for a moment is worth colliding with the ground”.

When McKay had finished knocking it into shape, Clark made him record five versions using five different guitars that he’d built.

It’s followed by another co-write, Real Cowboy, a dig at wannabes in stetsons, this time with Leigh, written during one of their trips from Nashville to Austin, and given a great speakeasy blues groove on a lyric about what separates the real from the fake (“A real cowboy’s got some fingers gone…A fake cowboy wears too much cologne”), but the playfulness comes with a sting in the tail that “A real cowboy lost his ranch to the bankers/And a fake cowboy owns them big oil tankers”.

There’s a further co-write down the list, Jerry Lee Lewis tinkling barroom piano from Kat Marx anchoring the rocking boogie Lurene, a collaboration with Becky Warren about McKay’s grandmother who, when the kids flew the nest, started working at a retail store selling 70s Texas-style women’s clothing, much to the dismay of her husband who couldn’t understand why she’d bother when he had a perfectly good job.

With twangy guitars, pedal steel and Jenee Fleenor on fiddle, Open All Night is a love song to the open road (“you know that the highway’s my very best lover and she’s ready for me anytime I’ve got her on my mind/She’s long, dark and skinny with her hot breath blowing on me/Black, smoky hair gets me going every time”). However, partly sung in Spanish and with Josh Baca on accordion, if the highway’s always faithful things takes a different direction for Somebody, Someway, Somewhere, as, recalling a time when he was living with a woman in a house she’s shared with a previous partner, doubts set in (“I’d best get started finding better things to do so that I’m not going crazy wondering who’s been touching you when your eyes say that you love me but, behind that pretty stare, I know you’re loving on somebody, someway, somewhere”).

Riding a jogging drum beat and fiddle, Get A Bag Of Ice is a goodtime swing tune about trying to cool down when the temperature soars that could have come from a forgotten Lovin’ Spoonful album while, again very much old-time, named for a small Texas town, Pawnee Waltz taps into the nostalgia of times and missing a lost loved one when “we were still wild and free and we clung to each other like the sand to the sea” thinking “Back to the dances by the old football field where we parked in my mama’s old grey Oldsmobile/Back before we had troubles and before we had faults” whereas now “the TV is busted and the floor moans and creaks. There’s a stain on the ceiling where the pipe upstairs leaks/The couple next door to me argues and fights and I miss you plenty on these hot Ft Worth nights”.

There’s more reminiscence and changing times on the penultimate When This Town Was Cool, a talking acoustic fingerpicked things were much better than blues over which Clark’s ghost hovers as the old-timer recounts to a young whippersnapper about the good old days before and two older old-timers come along with their memories of even earlier days back “Before sushi, before tofu, before gravy, grits or gruel and I never dreamed I’d meet you bunch of lazy, crazy fools”.

If that sounds like the sort of overheard conversation that might serve as inspiration for a song, then you’ll appreciate him ending with You Oughta Write A Song About That, a circling fingerpicked melody and pedal steel stained number that again channels Clark that recalls song pitches made to him by audience members after a show, though the one who came up with the one about “a guy in California on a desert route, gets a hotel room but he wants tocheck out. They won’t let him leave the party where he’s at” might consider suing The Eagles. Clark considered McKay a kindred spirit; this immensely listenable album is firm evidence of his excellent judgement.