You have to admire a man who scatters his old drivers’ licenses—not blurred out, either, just strategically placed—all over the inside of his latest CD. It’s a telling gesture, a testament to Delbert McClinton’s experience, his honesty, and the restless nature of his muse. Here is a man who spends a lot of time traveling, musically as well as literally, and the evidence is all over Cost Of Living, his fourth album (and third studio release) on the New West label. In fact, if you count the discs, you find that he’s stayed at this label longer than any other. Is Delbert finally ready to settle down into musical domesticity?
Not hardly. This Texas legend, best known to the outside world for the 1980 hit “Giving It Up For Your Love,” essays a remarkable number of styles here, even by his standards. “Your Memory, Me, And The Blues,” for example, is half C&W weeper and pleading R&B ballad, “Midnight Communion” works in function and form like Randy Newman trying on Merle Haggard’s clothes, and “Right To Be Wrong” festoons a solid cowbell groove with sinister rock-guitar filigrees, then abandons it all in the chorus for a roadhouse lope, a move even more daring than it looks on paper. These experiments work perfectly, which is all the evidence you need that Delbert arrived at his unique blend of roots musics through love, not marketing. Well, that and the typically excellent songwriting, which McClinton provides and/or guides.
Elsewhere, the star-crossed Bonnie and Clyde in “Dead Wrong” ride along to a juiced-up swamp-rock revel, the closing “Alright By Me” brings West Coast blues to a Lone Star setting, “while the semicomic pledge of devotion “Hammerhead Stew” reveals itself as remarkably harmonic for a such a straightforward roadhouse shuffle. Only “Two Step Too” behaves just as you think it will, and that turns out to be okay, too. Actually, the gentle “Down In Mexico” is mournful and yet nonthreatening enough to be a hit, even if only on the AC charts. Doesn’t matter—a man like Delbert McClinton knows how to make the most of where he is.