An Exploration of Robert Luther Smith - ‘Bluesman’
Here is a character study disguised as a blues song disguised as an autobiography, and the layers of that disguise are entirely intentional and entirely part of the point…
The Blues Man, the figure at the heart of Robert Luther Smith's new album and its title track, is partly invented and partly not. He moves from place to place, watching people, observing love and loss and the peculiar unpredictability of ordinary life, never settling, never finding what he is looking for, making music from the searching. That description, Luther acknowledges, is a fairly accurate account of what he is actually like. The character clarified the pattern. The pattern was always the character.
The wordplay in the opening lyric does something that the best blues writing has always done: it compresses the entire emotional landscape of the song into a few short lines without appearing to try. Black cat just crossed my path. Never get the breaks. That's why I'm blue, man. The pun is so clean and so precisely functional, the mood and the genre and the character and the self-awareness arriving simultaneously, that it makes everything that follows feel inevitable in the best possible way. Luther has been observing long enough to recognise that kind of economy when it arrives.
The American road mythology that runs through the concept gives the blues tradition its most iconic spatial metaphor: the highway as the proper home of someone constitutionally unable to stop moving. The British songwriter fascinated by American road trips, more interesting in the imagination than any English equivalent, finding in the restless movement between places a structure for making sense of a lifetime's worth of watching. There is a distinctly Bowie-ish quality to the construction, a real character built from genuine self-observation, the invented and the autobiographical so thoroughly interwoven that the distinction stops mattering.
The instrumentation brings together Epiphone Casino rhythm guitar and Fender Stratocaster lead alongside drums, bass and keys in a production that captures the feel of a live band without sacrificing the contemporary clarity that his decade-long creative partnership with producer Dave Thomas has developed. Stevie Wonder and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix all somewhere in the fabric of the approach, none of them defining it, Luther's own voice too long-developed and too specifically itself to be reduced to its components.
He stepped away from releasing music for around ten years. He came back. The Blues Man was waiting on the road exactly where he had left him. He had more to say than before. He still does.
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