Singer-songwriter-producer, multi-instrumentalist Will Kimbrough is not one to sit idle. Throughout the pandemic, he has been regularly holding virtual concerts from his home, dubbed Pollenfest, constant streaming and blogging through his Patreon page, producing another Shemekia Copeland album , Uncivil War, (also covered on these pages) which is also released at this same time, and surely, he’s been writing his own songs too. And there’s more production projects as well as his continued work with the organization Songwriting for Soldiers, among his many pursuits. Spring Break speaks directly to the pandemic, a time when we all “took a break.” Kimbrough has never been a stranger to political themes as among others, his 2006 Americanitis emphatically attested. This one has themes of the great American divide, tragic losses, and emotional reactions to the pandemic, all served up solo and acoustically with ihs array of guitars, mandolin, and harmonica. Some are written alone but most with co-writers. He laid down three new songs in his home studio and, satisfied, kept up the flow. “Home Remedy” and “Plow to the End of the Row” had Adrienne Young collaborating while “Rocket Fuel” and “Cape Henry” involved Todd Snider. Only one of the tunes is a revisit.
Kimbrough apparently modeled the effort on those Folkways and Vanguard acoustic folk recordings from the ‘60s in this album chock full of terrific songs, all but the one recorded in April of this past year. Arguably, the most memorable of the bunch is “The Late Great John Prine Blues” on which he offers this, “…I wrote this new song the day after John passed. I’ll never forget taking one of those Spring 2020 quarantine walks with my wife and 19-year-old youngest daughter. It was a beautiful Spring night. We strolled and talked. My phone blew up with the news that Prine had passed. I didn’t want to spoil the walk so I kept it to myself…When we got home, I let my family know the news. Tears flowed. Spent the rest of the evening and the following morning reading everyone’s online tributes, playing John’s records, sharing memories…Then I just started singing this tune… I guess I wrote “The Late Great John Prine Blues” because I needed to process the loss of someone I had idolized since childhood. Someone who had signed my band to his record label. Someone I had joined onstage for encores of “Paradise” with Todd Snider. With Emmylou Harris…”
It’s hard to tell if the idea for “My Right Wing Friend” owes to Jackson Brown’s “My Redneck Friend” but regardless it is a fabulous ode to friendship from the Alabama native who obviously knows more than a few right wingers. After chronicling the decades, here’s the last verse – “So here we are in 2020 Social distancing/Trump is in the White House…ain’t life a funny thing/And when the virus took John Prine/We cried there goes my every everything/Now we are all Sam Stones – Alone with our balloons/I guess I’ll always love you Though My views will always rub you/And I know that I’m above you/I will always ever love you still, My right wing friend”
Somewhat similar is “All Fall Down,” written with a friend, after discussing he world of politics surrounding COVID and the divided United States. Now with President Trump suffering from the virus the lyrics take on even more emphasis. “something in the air don’t feel right/something don’t feel like it should/maybe we should listen to wise advice/maybe it’d do some good/someone in the room don’t play fair/someone wants to make his own rules/maybe nobody can see they’re/in the hands of fools…fools”
His song “I Want Out” perfectly captures the drudgery and despair of the waitress working in a diner, especially with this collection of words – “She says come on back y’all, come on back/But that’s not what she means/And if you look into her eyes/You can almost hear her scream”. Kimbrough and Todd Snider did their homework retelling the post-Revolutionary War battle in “Cape Henry.” Kimbrough also finished a song with songwriting hero, Milton Brown, one of Jimmy Buffet’s (another band that Kimbrough plays in) mentors- the closing “Digging a Ditch with a Spoon.”
This is a combination of fine picking and superior songwriting. As good as Kimbrough’s albums have been, especially Sideshow Love, this is his strongest solo effort.
