Cole Mitchell
American Roots Singer/ 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."
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.