For the past several albums since the pandemic, Joe Ely has pored over the material in his hefty archives for hours on end, and now we have the fourth album from that effort, Love and Freedom. This one is bit different in a few ways. Ely found these rough track demos, but the multi-track aspect disappeared. No problem.
At the behest of his wife, Sharon, Ely called in trusted allies Lloyd Maines and engineer Pat Manske to flesh out these tracks and turned to Ely’s longtime collaborators, accordionist Joel Guzman and guitarist David Grissom, to assist on a few tracks. In contrast, Ely played all instruments on some, and Maines contributed on some others. Also, this is the first time, and it was almost serendipitous, that Ely chose songs around social justice issues, addressing immigration, poverty, war, justice, and freedom, all through songs he’d been accumulating for decades. So, two days shy of his 78th birthday, we hear Joe Ely in a fine voice in relatively lo-fi compared to the Ely of years past, singing some of the most relevant material he’s recorded: nine originals and four covers.
In essence, given the theme and stripped-down instrumentation, this is a folk-rock album. Nonetheless, when born a rocker like Ely, at least a couple of these tunes rock hard, especially the opener, “Shake ‘Em Up,” based on the dice games in the Wild West. Here, as he does on two others, he plays all instuments, in this case including synthesizers and electric drums. From here, though, excepting the covers of two Townes Van Zandt tunes, most of the material ties to the theme.
Guzman joins, imbuing “Adios Sweet Dreams” with a Tex-Mex feel as Ely sings about being separated from loved ones after crossing the border and finding that the so-called land of the free is overhyped. In a related way, he covers Guy Clark’s “Magdalene,” again with Guzman on his side. The tune has the protagonist urging his love to go with him to Mexico to escape the daily grind. This immigration thematic almost naturally has to include Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” this version with Ryan Bingham assisting on vocals. Ely pours his passion into this one, making it probably one of the top three versions of the song to these ears, eclipsed only by his fellow Texan, the late Nanci Griffith on Other Voices Other Rooms and longtime colleague Jimmie Dale Gilmore on the Gilmore/Dave Alvin Downey to Lubbock. Ely blows harmonica, and takes a faster tempo on Van Zandt’s classic dirge “Waitin’ Around to Die” yet, together with Maines, he delivers a poignant rather faithful version of Townes’ “For the Sake of the Song.”
The remainder of the album are originals. “Sgt. Baylock” is a brief respite from the serious material, although one could take this as an outcry to the random arrests under this new administration. In any case, the Sergeant would just randomly arrest Ely for trumped-up vagrancy charges only to meet the forgiving sergeant in a bar many years later only to be hauled off with him and two others to jail for drunkenness.
Five others are deadly serious. In the mid-tempo rocker (with Grissom) a man goes to jail for telling the truth in “Today It Did” while on “Band Of Angels,” translated in today’s terms, he and his gang are running for the border to outpace the ICE agents.
“Here’s to the Braves” celebrates Native Americans and “No One Wins” was penned after touring Ground Zero shortly after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The lyrics to “What Kind Of War” are akin to the protest albums of the ‘60s. Here’s an excerpt – “Would you war for the spoils, a war for the oil/Or a war not remembered what for?/Would you war for the grieving/Or just to get even/With a war to end all wars” His “Surrender to the West” may be a bit more abstract, or maybe universal but it’s rather easy to read into the continuing conflicts in the Middle East.
Five plus decades on, one of greatest troubadours, Joe Ely, keeps pushing forward.
