Jack Redell

Jack Redell is an American classic in the making. Some day, folks will speak of Redell's time here with a reverence generally reserved for Tom Waits and Jack Kerouac ... And since last year's brilliant, full-length release, Famous American, the prolific troubador has written two binders full of unreleased songs. He has a haunting storytelling ability that recalls Nebraska-era Springsteen delivered with the fierce conviction of a young Johnny Cash and the timbre of Jay Farrar. - Westword

The Late Jack Redell isn’t dead and gone like he wants you to believe. Orphanage Road, Redell’s sophomore album, tips its black hat to the fact that the wandering troubadour is in fact still on his feet, up around the next bend.

A gritty album, Orphanage Road shows the late, great Redell flickering in the blue burn of candlelight, between his signature hushed vocals and the driving ride of the mythical Valkyries. In the pages of this album Redell keeps the earth shaking with the heat of hooves – if not straight away, then deep behind, in the dark stars of night.

Always, always the Valkyries are storming down Orphanage Road.

In total, the album is a wondrous Corps of Discovery. In “Forty-four” Redell stands on his toes like a prizefighter, ready to lengthen his gait, increase his pace; spur the horses into a wild and dusty gallop to reclaim what only a man can. Forever wandering, Redell’s “Stopping-off Place” is a knoll on the grassy sweep of the Colorado plains; the one stop in his protracted journey from the Carolinas where you can see Redell peering up and into the jagged eruption of the Rocky Mountains. “Tomorrow the Smoke and the Tide” is sweet and pocked with craters of the wild and windswept fervor of war and love.

In-between the chapters of the album’s tale, Redell employs haunting, marching instrumentals that salute the ghostly soldiers of battles never catalogued by history. And this is where most of Orphanage Road lives: Weaving in and out of narratives – leaving the listener to wonder if everything is Redell, or you and me and the stories we inherited from our sepia ancestors. In this, all of Redell’s characters seem to be coming or going to some pane’s gray kind of place – to engorge a river’s canyon, or homestead in some great and tall metal city.

Enlisting some of Denver’s most notable musicians Redell thickened the campfire swell of his album’s allure (included was Born in the Flood’s Nathaniel Rateliff, Joseph Pope III and Matt Fox; as well as musicians John William Davis and Gann Matthews, to name a few). In this military assortment, the instrumentation roves from the terrifying to the inexplicably gorgeous. Forever savvy, Redell enabled himself through his collaborations to color Orphanage Road with the entire spectrum of the human condition: Cavernous holes in canyon rock, and even fingers of sun swirling in the evening sky can be seen, and felt.

In all, the Late Jack Redell has managed to create the kind of mystique and legend that was born into the American experience by living rough around the edges of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Wandering, wandering, ever to come home – we are all orphaned at some point in our lives. - www.denversyntax.com