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Steve Smith and Hard Road, Only So Fast
Genre: Bluegrass, Americana
What happens when a Kentucky musician adopts Las Cruces as his home? Give a listen to Steve Smith and Hard Road’s Only So Fast, a brilliant mix of old-time bluegrass melodies and Americana tunes peppered with lyrics infused with years of desert living.
Smith writes most of the band’s engaging lyrics, but vocalist Chris Sanders and bass player Elijah Copeland also contribute to the spirited compositions. Nate Lee provides a haunting fiddle introduction to Sanders and Smith’s “Only So Fast.” Smith picks up the pace with his hard-driving mandolin playing as he passionately sings about a fleeing youth running down a railroad track.
“Dry Spell” will resonate with Southwesterners as Sanders belts out, “It’s been a long hot, dry spell / hardly a change in the weather. . . . / This damn heat has got me beat / I’m tired of cursin’ at the weather. / The baby’s cryin’ / the crops are dyin’/ but still there’s no change in the weather.”
The title of “I Shot My Gun” comes from a line in an old blues song that Wayne Shrubsall discovered. In his catchy country-bluegrass rendition, Shrubsall’s vocal delivery is direct: “Trapped in old New Mexico with no work to be found, / I shot my gun in the heart of town.”
In “The Real You,” bass player Copeland injects what he calls his Afro-Cuban sound—it really swings. Throughout, Smith’s mandolin and guitar, Lee’s fiddle, Shrubsall’s banjo, and Copeland’s bass lines tightly weave in and out to create a lively bluegrass sound. And I was moved by Sanders’s plaintive old-time vocals on “Eden Prairie,” which tells the poignant story of a schoolgirl “in trouble.” To order, visit www.hardroadband.com.
-- Emily Drabanski