RY COODER - I, Flathead (2008)
If guitarist Ry Cooder's best albums are movie
scores, including the folk-culture clash of 1985's Alamo Bay and the
purple-prairie atmospheres of 1989's Paris, Texas. So it makes sense
that, offscreen, he writes music like a film director. I, Flathead
completes Cooder's trilogy of albums about endangered subcultural
California (following 2005's Chavez Ravine and 2007's My Name Is
Buddy), and a deluxe edition of this CD comes with a novella. You will
need it to fully grasp the concept — Cooder plays a fictional race-car
driver and struggling country singer, Kash Buk — but it is easy to
enjoy the songs as individual scenes, by turns sultry (the
mariachi-R&B opener "Drive Like I Never Been Hurt"), comic (the
Western-swing gag "Spayed Kooley") and romantic (the cantina-band
yearning of "Filipino Dance Hall Girl"). Cooder sings the album's best
number, "5,000 Country Music Songs," in character, as Buk, but in a way
closer to the 1972 gem "Boomer's Story" — like a guy making slow
headway in an indifferent world, to tart, poignant guitar-playing that
is a sweet, short movie in itself. - rollingstone.com
01. Drive Like I Never Been Hurt
02. Waitin' for Some Girl
03. Johnny Cash
04. Can I Smoke In Here?
05. Steel Guitar Heaven
06. Ridin' With the Blues
07. Pink-O-Boogie
08. Fernando Sez
09. Spayed Kooley
10. Filipino Dance Hall Girl
11. My Dwarf Is Getting Tired
12. Flathead One More Time
13. 5000 Country Music Songs
14. Li
ttle Trona Girl