It’s been over a decade since Drivin N Cryin frontman Kevn Kinney last put out a solo album. But thanks to the forced solitude and endless time offered courtesy of the global pandemic, Kinney finally had the opportunity to pull together that long overdue record.
With the help of some friends that also happened to be amazingly talented musicians, Think About It is a worthy, if stripped down companion to his solo catalogue. The record features R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Bill Berry, Drive-By Truckers’ Brad Morgan and Laur Joamets (Drivin N Cryin, Midland, Sturgill Simpson) among others.
The album opens with the title track, a Blues/Jazzy slow tempo song with Kinney’s deep vocals over a heavy bass line, subtle guitar and brushed drums that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Tom Waits’ record. The ten tracks that follow continue in a similar vein with the same slow to mid-tempo arrangements and Kinney’s almost spoken word delivery. It’s a little hard to adjust to at first if your only orientation is Drivin N Cryin’s Punk meets Southern Roots Rock, but it’s satisfying, nonetheless. Kinney does however rework an old Drivin n Cryin classic “Another Scarlet Butterfly,” originally off their 1986 debut. This revised version is stripped down slightly, giving the song even more impact.
The album’s musical direction was inspired, in part, by the death of Kinney’s longtime friend, musician Col. Bruce Hampton. “When Col. Bruce died, I had the idea of taking a different approach, having all these different styles of musicians play with me—something, in the spirit of Bruce, that was a little more out there,” Kinney said recently. “The idea was to do something a little more spoken word, singing in a lower register than usual for some of it, and using words to paint these picturesque landscapes. I didn’t want to fill in all the spaces; I wanted to have a lot more air for things to grow from.”
Nowhere is that experimentation more obvious than on the closing track, “Never The Twain Shall Meet,” a two-and-a-half minute spoken word track. It’s also the least accessible song here. But that track aside, the rest of the album is a solid follow up to 2011’s A Good Country Mile.
