Contributed By: Beyond 2000
Created On: Wednesday, 05 March 2008
Hits: 38
 A Long Way from Tupelo Even if he sounded like your average heartland rocker, you could always count on a few curveballs from Thorn – he was sort of a younger, less sarcastic John Hiatt. All of this is a very roundabout way of leading up to the fact that Thorn’s fifth album, A Long Way from Tupelo, is the strangest, most unexpected thing he’s ever done – specifically, a straight-ahead, Michelob-scented, AOR album, beamed from a Camaro-shaped satellite trapped in a starless 1984 sky. Listening to it is like walking into the kitchen of a suite in a five-star hotel and discovering a butter churn – it isn’t an unpleasant discovery, exactly, but certainly an unexpected one. Who put it there? Were they trying to be funny? Does it still work?
The answers to those three questions, as they relate to A Long Way from Tupelo, are as follows: Paul Thorn (duh); only Thorn knows for sure, but probably not; and…maybe. It’s difficult to imagine that there’s still much of an audience for this stuff, but if you’re the type of listener who spends a lot of time spinning old Seger records and pining for the days when rock & roll still meant something, man, then you’re as likely as not to wind up wanting to sleep with this album under your pillow. On the other hand, if that description doesn’t apply to you, you’re liable to walk away from Tupelo before the first song is halfway finished. And if you’re a longtime Paul Thorn fan, well, it’s probably best to proceed with caution. This isn’t a total departure for him – in fact, he’s been steadily sanding the quirk out of his albums as he’s gone along – but unless your affection for his earlier records had everything to do with their sound and nothing to do with Thorn’s songwriting voice, Tupelo is a perplexing, somewhat disappointing listen.
 
|
