At last fall’s Americana Music Association conference in Nashville, everybody wanted to be Dale Watson. Many of the bands performing had fallen in love with honky-tonk music and were performing their versions of it, in some cases post-modernly, in others, with a self-conscious lack of irony. Watson, on the other hand, has been singing honky-tonk more or less his entire musical career with the exception of a brief, unpleasant dalliance in Nashville which led him to write “Nashville Rash.” He turns the sort of phrases that define the country of yesteryear, but lines such as “An eye for an eye / would leave the whole world blind” never sound forced or winking.

 

Similarly, the “outlaw” in his country sounds natural, the product of his world view, not some marketing scheme. Like Merle Haggard, that makes his politics a little idiosyncratic, but they’re real, and that realness is what the performers at the AMA envied, whether they’d admit it or not.

 

From the Johnny Horton-like opener “Justice for All,” there’s a subdued, reflective tone. Only “You Always Get What You Always Got” and “Runaway Train” get out of second gear. Hard times are the standard grist for the honky-tonk mill, but these blues sound as if they come from a genuinely darker place. Watson has the craft to make felt lines sound like they could be genre efforts and vice versa, all of which makes the album more fascinating.