Bobby Bare Jr.'s new song, "Borrow Your Girlfriend," begins with a young man asking to take his sibling's lover for a spin while describing her as tight, fast and easy to control. But by song's end, he reveals that he's talking about a motorcycle, not a woman.
Similarly, "Your Adorable Beast" seems to describe a man submitting to a dominant lover, saying that he'd look cute on the end of her leash and that she should kick him if he does something wrong. But by song's end, it's clear that he's using owner/pet images simply to express puppy love for an object of his affection.
Bare gets away with these O. Henry twists because he expresses them with such gleeful charm and to such buoyant, off-kilter melodies. Like many twisted comic songwriters—Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, John Prine—Bare can broach pathological subject matter as long as he does so with a wink and a crooked grin.
Bare's taken this path since introducing himself with 1998's garage-crunch blast, Boo-Tay!, in which he portrayed himself as a hapless misogynist whose crass revelations about his ex-lovers were trumped by his own hilarious self-loathing. He made it work because, despite his first-person rants, listeners knew that this skewed portrait wasn't autobiographical, but instead a dressing down of the most wretched actions of which all men are capable.
On his new From the End of Your Leash, an album credited to Bobby Bare Jr.'s Young Criminals' Starvation League, he's treading the same turf, but with more musical and lyrical nuance. His League of players—17 in all—includes members of the musically adventurous band Lambchop and like-minded guests Andrew Bird on fiddle and whistle, Waldo Weathers on baritone sax, Mike Grimes on bass and Duane Denison on guitar. Bare also features several duet partners, including Will Oldham, singer-trumpeter Kami Lyle and, most effectively, Carey Kotsionis on "Favorite Hat."
As he has since 2002, when he first recorded under the Young Criminals' banner, Bare is building unpredictable arrangements that are anything but conventional. With an acoustic center and plenty of electric accents, the music drifts and lopes while random but well-placed sounds—a tambourine, a fuzz-toned guitar, a droning background noise—add elements of surprise that keep things engaging.
Bare's songs rarely follow a verse/chorus construction—with the exception of "Things I Didn't Say," a formal country song of such cleverly stated repentance that it's easy to imagine it in the repertoire of George Strait or Merle Haggard. Elsewhere, Bare prefers to provoke, as he does in his accounting of the Nashville music industry in "Visit Me in Music City," or in the details of the headlong fall of a coke-addicted girlfriend that he's kissing off in "Terrible Sunrise."
Like many good comic artists, Bare likes testing the boundaries of good taste. But what makes From the End of Your Leash so winning is how cleverly and inventively he yanks the listener's chain. He and his band play Exit/In on Saturday.
—Michael McCall
