Will Shef's songwriting is some fierce prose, moving in and out of resentment and despondency, with only occasional bursts of self-fulfillment. On Black Sheep Boy, Shef's songs are brooding and wildly alive, replete with bursts of guitar, border trumpets, and picked-over strings. His lyrics thematically hang together like strange fairy-tales hatched in the back of a lonely cantina or conjured up during a red-eyed drive across the west Texas desert. The tenacious "For Real" could easily fit in this spot, but in the more accomplished "A King and a Queen," Shef's restlessness is cast as a love-fable that Leonard Cohen wished he had written.
Why listen? Black Sheep Boy (its liner notes in prose form complete with chapters) is a monument of literate songwriting. "A King and a Queen" has few peers in its high-minded yet thoroughly roots-rock world.
Something else? Enjoy "A Stone," "Black Sheep Boy," "Another Radio Song," "Westfall," "Song of Our So-Called Friend," and "Lost Coastlines."
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