Cole Mitchell
"American Roots singer and songwriter Cole Mitchell's work is an expression of a hard life, well lived. "Kind of a sideways take on the music I'd heard as a kid hangin' around my grandmother's honky tonk in southern New Mexico. See, I was born in Billy the Kidd country," says Cole. "and raised in Hank Williams country."
Spending many of his formative years in Alabama, he moved back to New Mexico in his teens to work his parent's ranch near the Gila Wilderness. "I never considered riding horses for pleasure," he says only partly kidding. Cole worked alongside his dad from an early age and got a steady stream of country radio. He started entertaining himself by learning to play a guitar his folks gave him, and soon enough started picking out Cowboy traditionals, as well as the Frizzell, Cash, and other country tunes his father listened to.
After discovering that 'other' music on rock and roll stations, Cole's rebellious nature was impressed and momentarily uprooted by such artists as The Stones and Faces. Until he learned how to blend the raucous style he was growing to love with the deep secure roots he had grown up with. So, full of piss and vinegar, he left home at sixteen to front a touring band that he'd impressed. Though he found the road invigorating, being of working man's stock Cole determined to get real about music, and about making a living.
Soon, he was back in New Mexico working long hours on oilrigs. He made good, bought a ranch, and before long was trading horses and running cattle. But his restlessness again took hold of him, and the next thing he knew he was skinning carcasses in a slaughterhouse in a town he didn't know. Not finding that work particularly appealing, Cole next got involved in a rather nefarious border business. Sensing that nothing good was coming out of most of it, he hit the road again. Through his forty days and nights in the wilderness, Cole's constant companion was his guitar and music his best friend.
Whether from good fortune or dumb luck he can't really say, but he eventually made his way north to Albuquerque where he soon came to the music establishment's attention as front man for Saddlesores. The Saddlesores went on to become a somewhat legendary roadhouse band specializing in their own brand of cow punk, a free wheeling mix of what Cole had been developing since his childhood. He fronted Saddlesores for some fifteen years stirring up powerhouse performances, writing and singing raucous, memorable songs that defied description and eventually came to be labeled, perhaps for lack of any available idiom, Americana.
Tragically, Cole lost his eyesight in 1992. Deciding to take this part of his journey anew, Cole broke with Saddlesores and has been recording and touring largely solo since. His current work still bears the mark of that raw and original take on life that colored much of his work with Saddlesores.
Cole's two solo CD releases are an expression of his transformation from a writer and front man for an iconoclastic, good time band to a poet and storyteller becoming more intimate with the raw honesty of life. During his travels along the highways and byways stretched between the Wild West and the Old South, he apparently learned a good bit by staying true to himself. Cole Mitchell's restless heart, and the people and places he's kept with him along the way, give his music an authenticity missing in too much of contemporary music. His heartfelt musings, dry humor, hard luck, and hard edge give these stories from the fringe of what's left of blue-collar America a genuine sense of real music, real life.
Cole Mitchell. American roots. American real."
Cole Mitchell
Cole's work is an expression of a hard life, well lived. "Kind of a sideways take on the music I'd heard as a kid hangin' around my grandmother's honky tonk in southern New Mexico. See, I was born in Billy the Kidd country," says Cole. "and raised in Hank Williams country."
So where is Cole Mitchell and what is it like there? Micthellandia is always somewhere, frequently somewhere that is specifically nowhere, and in general everywhere. Sometimes you see it in Technicolor, and sometimes in sepia, and everything in between. It is always a notable fact of someone’s biography that they have gone blind, as Cole did in 1992, but when I hear his songs I see pictures with a rare kind of cinematic clarity. Could be bleached out Spaghetti Western, could be the hard-edged shadows of noir. The memory of sight for him has become more intense than the actual power of sight. There is usually dust in these visions, and there is often a particular kind of light you see in the southwest when the dry winds are blowing and anything metallic will explode into blue sparks when you touch it.
Mitchellandia is a thirsty place. Cole’s characters, like Cole himself, are always thirsty. Cole’s dramatis personae look for hydration where it’s least to be found, and Cole has some experience with that. The people in his story-songs have not found a good well. Cole however, has, and he writes (and sings) with compassion about the people who’re still looking for a well of pure water.
Primordial Reckoning, Cole’s latest and best of his three solo albums, finds the one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter in kind of late-blooming mastery that is a rare and wonderful thing. It doesn’t represent a departure from his prior work so much as the purest distillation yet of his unique artistry; nobody who’s heard Cole’s music won’t recognize the plaintive, lone coyote swoops that spring naturally from his voice or the kindness of heart with which he sketches folks who’ve fallen short of social acceptability. The kinds of characters who’ve taken squatters’ rights in his imagination are recognizable as wellrestless creatures at home neither in the world nor their own skin, and often fruitlessly looking to geography to put things right. There are flashes of the cow-punk sensibility of his prior work, “Nobody’s Blues,” which hovered somewhere between Steve Earl and Vic Chesnutt in sensibility, but I find the excellent “Invictus” to be a foreshadowing of this current album, which I regard as Cole’s masterwork to date.
Yep, it’s the same Cole his listeners have come to know and love. But lyrically, vocally and musically, the songs seem to me born from a ripening convergence of heart and head and a perfected sense of emotional navigation. In other words, Cole knows exactly where he’s taking us.
Primordial Reckoning is indeed an album of standouts, pointed up by superb musicianship from Cole’s standing ad hoc backup band, the Acoustic Curs made up of August Johnson on brushes, blue grass jewels Shelby and Jacob Means on stand up base and mandolin and on lead guitar Johnny Burns, son of Jethro Burns Nephew of Chet Atkins and former band leader for John Prine. This town is like a strip of fly tape, hanging from a west Texas gas station ceiling, begins the song “Throw Me a Line,” and that line alone is enough to set a novel spinning in one’s head. The duet, “Mama,” sung with female vocalist Shelby Lee Means, depicts a wayward waif lost in the bigger largeness, and your heart breaks for the parties at both ends of this particular phone call, though you only hear it from one side. With the song “Smile,” Cole goes where angels, at least smart ones, fear to tread and comes out with a piece that ought to find its place as a standard (the general rule about songs that extol the virtue of smiling generally impel one to smash the first thing in sight, but Cole is powerfully persuasive here). Here again, Cole treads into quicksand that has swallowed lesser writers. I listen to these songs of troubled people, and I find understanding and solace. Put another way, these are not message songs. They remind me of found post-cards, or an overheard conversation written on a napkin by someone sitting two bar stools down, or walking past a phone booth. We get just enough of the words to hang the rest of the story on, and if it’s not our own it’s that of somebody we know. His imagery is concrete yet metaphorical, and his rhyme schemes are usually placed just a little off plumb in a way that glues the words together with a puff of air in your ear. The more at home he becomes, the more he conveys the pain of searching.
info@colemitchellmusic.com
505-514-0323
POBox 35901
Albuquerque, NM 87176