Jack McKeon - Talking To Strangers (2024) Hi-Res

Jack McKeon’s debut, Talking to Strangers, is a young man’s album. He’s at the age where he can objectively see the world around him and where he fits in the larger picture. His ten tales of American life address the vicissitudes dictated by time and other related factors. The singer-songwriter is old enough to understand that transformation is the one constant, which is not always for the better.

Or as he sings it on “Highway 29”, “Times always changing the way that we’re living.” Whether they are building an interstate where there once were farm fields or a couple’s love turning sweeter like wine, McKeon observes the telling particulars of what was lost and gained. As the poet says, nothing comes from nothing, but progress is just another word for nothing left to lose, or maybe it doesn’t. He cites Keats and Kerouac in his lyrics, but his lyrics are more prose-like than poetry. McKeon is content with telling his stories in plain language without decorating the details.

Talking to Strangers is a bluegrass record, and the traditional instrumentation inherently and effectively comments on what is now as compared with what existed before. Jack McKeon plays guitar and is joined by Ashby Frank on mandolin, Vickie Vaughn on upright bass, Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle, and Justin Hoffman on banjo and dobro. It was over three days at The Tractor Shed in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. But McKeon is not a Tennessean by ancestry. He comes to bluegrass via upstate New York. McKeon may not be authentic in the conventional sense of being born in bluegrass country, but his songs show a natural affinity for the genre. He now lives in Nashville.

The singer-songwriter has a compassionate heart. McKeon sees the good in people, even when they are a little strange. He knows we all disappear sooner or later, whether we become dispossessed by life’s circumstances, individual death, or even worse. On songs such as “Willow Lane”, “Crooked Teeth”, and “Waffle House Wonder”, McKeon empathetically conjectures about the inner lives of down and outers. He understands the power of circumstance. None of us really control our destinies. We live with the illusion that tomorrow will be like today, but who knows when a pivotal moment will turn things around? One day, it will be too late if the forecasters are right. The end of the world is coming. The best we can do is fall in love while still here. Like a spark in a rainstorm, it may not set the world on fire, but that doesn’t mean we should not hope.

Jack McKeon wrote or co-wrote all the material but one song, “Past the Point of Rescue”, best known in America as performed by Hal Ketchum and written by the Irish Mick Hanly. On the surface, the tale of unrequited love seems to fly against the message of his self-penned material. On a deeper level, the track fits in with its larger theme. Even an unfulfilled love is better than not feeling. Life is a struggle, whether one is a self-reliant farmer holding out against urban sprawl as on the sprightly “Last Slice of Heaven” or one living on borrowed time on “Paler Shade of Blue”. That gives our existence a deeper meaning.

Tennessee Williams famously had Blanche DuBois say in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” This transplanted Big Bender volunteers his newly gained knowledge and instructs listeners to talk to strangers as a way of being kind. The ten songs on his debut release engage one in a musical conversation about life without being condescending or heavy. He sings and plays stories that remind us to be good to ourselves and others.