Day 392: Lee Hazlewood - Trouble Is A Lonesome Town
Today I needed a nice, mellow Sunday album to get me ready for the week. I’ve had Lee Hazlewood on my list of artists to listen to for a long time now, and a strange country concept album might be just the thing for shifting my Sunday blues.
Album cover courtesy of Mercury
Lee Hazlewood was a country-pop artist from Oklahoma who released solo albums, but who was also a prolific songwriter and producer. He started off as a radio DJ and worked on the Armed Forces Radio in Japan during the Korean war and got a degree in broadcasting after he came back to the US. Then he became a songwriter and started a record label. He was working with artists like Duane Eddy and Sanford Clark, but some of the most iconic songs he wrote and produced were for Nancy Sinatra, as he was behind her big hits like “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” and “Summer Wine”.
Trouble Is a Lonesome Town was released in 1963 as his debut studio album, and apparently it was recorded as a demo to showcase the songs for other artists, but the president of Mercury Records told him that it’s already an album in its own right and he should just release it. It’s a concept album about the inhabitants of a town called Trouble. It mainly consists of Lee Hazlewood’s voice over acoustic guitar and harmonica, with a little spoken section at the beginning of each song.
The album is very cinematic in how it builds the story of the album through the lazy, meandering narration of Lee Hazlewood. It kind of reminds me of the narrator of The Big Lebowski, which is right up my street. And the storytelling is what makes the album so engaging to listen to, he has this way of taking these arguably mundane-sounding lives from a nondescript town and elevating it into an interesting story, even if the story is just that there’s an ugly guy in town, or the beautiful girl in town wasn’t much of a wife, at least according to her husband.
I enjoyed my time in Trouble, it was 40 minutes well spent. I don’t think I’ll visit again but I’m definitely looking into more of Lee Hazlewood’s stuff, I love his oddball writing and his deep but velvety voice. He also kind of reminds me of another Album a Day favourite, Harry Nilsson, not at all because they sound similar but from how they infuse humour into their songs, there’s a dry wit to this album that I really enjoy.
I’m giving it a 7.5/10, I liked it but it’s definitely a one-off for me, it’s one of those concept albums that you only really need to hear once. But I’m very keen to hear his later stuff, which is described as cowboy psychedelia, I can tell from what I’ve heard that I’ll like it.