When an artist says that he lives to make music, it can often be a throwaway line but in the case of legendary Texas singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham, that statement is all too real. Graham was apparently momentarily dead after collapsing in his van after a blistering set at Fitzgerald’s American Music Festival (outside of Chicago) in 2019. His heart had stopped, and he had quit breathing apparently due to dehydration. He’s been questioned often since, whether he saw the white light, who else he saw, and so forth but can only remember a deep peaceful sleep.
Such an incident gives one not only a new appreciation for life but the realization that it could be over at any moment. Yet, almost just as miraculously, Graham now finds himself back with the New West family (on their Strolling Bones imprint) where he cut his first three albums in the early 2000s. Only Dead for a Little While is his first album in seven years and first full-length since 2010’s It’s Not as Bad As it Looks. Having survived that near-death experience and a subsequent battle with Covid, the 64-year-old Graham returns with what he terms the best album he’s ever made.
If by chance you are new to Graham, he has one of the most gravelly, hoarse-sounding voices you’ve heard but he is a terrific wordsmith and a take-no-prisoners rocker. The album opens with the searing “Where It All Went Wrong,” basically taking us back through a history of damnation “when the first monkey fell/out of the chattering tree.”
Naturally, many of these songs touch on mortality, perhaps best captured in the dobro imbued “See You By the Fire” which begins with a dream of a friend who died long ago and proceeds to blur the lines between life and death pointing toward that ‘glow,’ an imagined campfire where we gather to sing and dance. The song has a singalong quality to boot. Given Graham’s brush with death, it’s not at all surprising to see ghosts appear in these songs, with “There’s a Ghost on the Train” having us follow Graham’s very word through the baggage car to the diner to the sleeper car. Punctuated by three strong power chords, it’s another gem from Graham’s pen. He uses biblical imagery while singing triumphantly about all the joys on the journey to the grand ending in the closing, stinging guitar rave-up “Lost in the Flood.” In the chugging “Lazarus” he challenges mortality and wins, invoking Warren Zevon and Papa Hemingway along the way. There’s even a gutty take on Rev. Gary Davis’s “Death Don’t Have No Mercy, “as raw as this oft-covered song has ever been rendered. A series of growls ends with an emphatic whisper.
Like the best, Graham can craft an infectious, indelible love song as we hear in “Brought Me Here to You” and he seems invigorated about life in his rather sarcastic yearning to become a cult figure in Sweden like Lee Hazelwood. While at first, it may seem like an escape song, the refrain of the Stockholm Syndrome indicates something much deeper at play. Despite the gap between albums, Graham hasn’t lost a step. If anything, he is sharper than ever.
