Renowned Producer/Songwriter John Leventhal Steps Out On Guitar Focused Solo Debut ‘Rumble Strip’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Beyond the headline, we should also mention John Leventhal as composer, arranger, and recording engineer, as he is certainly a musical polymath with few peers. The six-time Grammy winner now takes yet another role with his first solo album, essentially an exposition of the many varied musical concepts he developed during the pandemic. These range from solo guitar pieces to vocal duets with his wife, Rosanne Cash, to fully developed orchestral pieces as he spans the genres of classical music, Anglican hymns, Southern soul, twang, and uncategorizable improvisation. It’s a stunning array of material but not surprising given Leventhal’s unique resume. The sequencing mixes these up but we will organize his compositions in three main groupings.

There are solo guitar pieces, the free-flowing, unfinished opening track “Floyd Cramer’s Dream” and the improvisatory title track featuring sting bending electric and slide guitars. “Tullamore Blues’ is a multi-tracked guitar piece in a similar vein with subtle touches of percussion and a lovely Celtic melody that adeptly merges with bluesier tones.  “Inwood Hill” is a moody acoustic piece, named for a favorite part of NYC where the Dutch famously bargained with the Lenape Indians over the sale of Manhattan. “Soul Op,” the only one penned pre-pandemic, is an until now unrecorded idea from the session Leventhal produced for William Bell and features multiple guitars with a catchy melody.  In a similar vein “Goodbye to That” is the requisite shuffle. The two hymns “JL’s Hymn No. 2” and JL’s Hymn No.3” were performed on acoustic guitar with lovely melodies evoking the kind found in the traditional classic “Shenandoah.” We’ve heard Leventhal’s stellar guitar work on albums from his wife, Sean Colvin, Kim Richey, and Kelly Willis, not to mention the classic William Bell album but that was all in service to the song, so it becomes almost revelatory to hear his playing unencumbered here.

The vocal tracks number three. The gripping single and percussion-heavy “That’s All I Know About Arkansas” will get the most notice and apart from vocalist Rosanne’s lyrics, Leventhal delivers an inventive West African/bluegrass riff along with two solos in the instrumental breaks nodding respectively to Ry Cooder and Clarence White. “If You Knew” has lyrics written by Matt Berninger of The National sung as a duet by Leventhal and Rosanne with atmospheric guitar breathing hints of psychedelia. The third track “The Only Ghost” was co-penned with Marc Cohn and originally intended to be sung by Dr. John on his final album that Leventhal mixed. That didn’t happen so Leventhal takes his lone solo vocal here instead in a hoarse, whispery style that’s appropriate for the haunting quality of both the lyrics and sonics.  The closing organ coda is a crafty unexpected touch.

The final grouping of songs is distinctly eclectic. He transforms classical composer Aaron Copland’s “Clarinet Concerto” into a tremolo-rich, heavy reverb guitar exercise.  The infectious stomping “Meteor” is replete with a horn arrangement as is “Three Chord Monte” which morphs from a country shuffle into a dreamy off-center twang. In both the horns are set back in the mix, simply adding a harmonious layer. The two songs with names in the titles are short pieces with “Marion and Sam” a transcription for two guitars of a cue from the Hitchcock film Psycho. “Who’s Afraid of Samuel Barber” is another bearing a haunting quality. It is based on the first movement of Barber’s Knoxville, 1915, a 1947 orchestral piece set to a prose poem by James Agee where Leventhal creates a musical soundscape of that place between twilight and sleep. 

Humbly pitched by Leventhal as kind of a musical scrapbook, this is so much more. This guitar-focused work will likely induce repeated listens due to its balance of ambient electric with pure acoustic picking. His unexpected chord changes, colorful blending of guitar tones, and rather odd pairings even in deceptively simple riffs make it challenging to absorb all these features in just one sitting. Even its unfinished, unresolved moments brim with marvelous musicianship and inventive ideas.