Music
Five years ago, Merle Haggard released If I Could Only Fly, a return to basics that combined world-weariness and sentimentality for one of his best albums. The sly “Bareback” and the elegiac “Wishing All These Old Things Were New” addressed Haggard’s wild-ass youth with a vitality that should have been the envy of a performer half his age, and his singing was playful, tossed-off and charming.
Haggard’s new Chicago Wind finds him again recording for Capitol, for whom he made classics like “Okie From Muskogee” as well as the 2004 album Unforgettable, a collection of standards. Produced by Jimmy Bowen (who came out of retirement for the project) and Mike Post, it doesn’t match If I Could Only Fly in spareness or specificity, but as a straightforward slice of Haggard in commercial mode, Chicago Wind has its moments.
On Fly’s “Honky Tonk Mama,” Haggard’s self-amused vocals sounded uncannily like two people at once. On Chicago Wind, he continues to sing with a self-assured eccentricity: his penetrating baritone makes the libertarian protest song “Where’s All the Freedom” engaging, even as lyrics like, “It’s the same in every town / Can’t show the Ten Commandments anymore,” skirt the simplistic.
“White Man Singin’ the Blues,” a song reprised from 1974’s Presents His 30th Album, doesn’t compare badly with the original. As on the title track, the production is agreeably widescreen, with Reggie Young and Billy Joe Walker Jr.’s guitars mixed up front with the drums—Young provides elegant, soulish grit, while Walker’s single-string lines hint at jazz. But producers Bowen and Post overdo things a bit on a version of Roger Miller’s “Leavin’s Not the Only Way to Go,” which leaves Haggard sounding neutralized.
Similarly bland is “Mexico,” where Haggard sings, “Don’t be afraid of banditos / Don’t believe what you’ve heard / There’s way more outlaws in old California.” It’s a pleasant throwaway, with a trumpet serving as south-of-the-border signifier. “Honky Tonk Man” and “It Always Will Be” are well-sung and unabashedly sentimental. But the real Merle Haggard transpires on “Rebuild America First,” where he advocates pulling out of Iraq and taking care of the country’s aging infrastructure. The song’s masterstroke occurs when Haggard offhandedly asserts his authority: “You think I’m blowing smoke / Boys, it ain’t no joke / I make 20 trips a year from coast to coast.”
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“Some of Us Fly” is a duet with Toby Keith, who sings manfully. But Haggard inflects the word “fly” with a delicious combination of self-parody and conviction, as if he’s all too aware of the ambiguities lined out in his lyrics: “Some play it smart, I had a ball / Some of us fly, all of us fall.”
A subtle argument for intelligent design that advocates self-determination, and a combined poker/ladder-of-success conceit that shouldn’t work but does, “Some of Us Fly” is contradictory and a little infuriating, like much of Haggard’s work. Chicago Wind might not be major Merle Haggard, but the album underscores what’s long been the case: the man is too complex for easy judgments.