REVIEW: Tommy Howell — American Storyteller (LP)

For decades now, Tommy Howell’s life has revolved around acting as a means of expression, and in his new album American Storyteller, his experiences are compressed into eleven tracks that don’t require a Ph.D. in life and living to relate to their narratives. “Hell of a Life,” “Whiskey Demon,” and “Cold Dead Hands” don’t try to tell us about our own lives so much as they illustrate scenes from the daily existence that befalls cities and rural roadhouses just the same. There’s something to learn about the American experience here, particularly the relationship that singer/songwriter Tommy Howell has developed with it since first discovering its many joys years ago.

URL: https://tommyhowellmusic.com/

The swagger of the instrumentation in the aforementioned “Cold Dead Hands,” “Lady Luck,” “Possessed” and bitter “‘88” is met with fierce angst from the lyricism that keeps us on our toes more than it lets us get comfortable — only in the best way possible. In some ways, this constant reinforcement of compositional conflict in American Storyteller is part of what helps the record to capture the spirit of unfiltered humility as brilliantly as it does.

Polished poetry has its place in the pop music lexicon, but for those of us who need something a little more unkempt and honest, there’s no getting around how spot-on the performances Tommy Howell gives here can be (especially when you’re in the same mood he is).

I would have liked the tracklist to center on the concepts in “Rose Hill” and “Hope I Ain’t Dead” rather than essentially wrapping up the album with their framework, but I suppose I can understand the kind of concept that Howell was trying to pull off by doing the opposite. The material here is, for lack of a better term, exceptionally diverse, and by bringing us into the stylistic conclusion of the record with a slightly softer tone than we start with, it does help to dampen some of the tension that still exists in the shadows of “Hope I Ain’t Dead” (my current frontrunner for the best deep cut of any album I’ve heard in this genre in 2023). There’s a method to Tommy Howell’s madness, and whether we get it or not, it’s yielding some killer songcraft this winter.

Fans of emotionally charged but unabashedly bruising folk/rock from the heart should not miss out on Tommy Howell’s American Storyteller. Sometimes grim, other times introspective, but constantly focused on expressiveness even when it doesn’t make us feel comforted, American Storyteller is as much an extension of Tommy Howell as his work in film has been, and though there are a lot of records in the Americana movement that you should be paying attention to right now, this is a staple that shouldn’t go unnoticed or unacknowledged by any means.

Howell is going out on a limb with us in every situation here, and it’s allowing for some of the most thoughtful work he’s ever offered to the public. Simply put, it’s tough to put down if you love provocative music, and that’s putting it quite mildly.

Colin Jordan