CD Review

Mallett, Dave
Ambition
(Flying Fish/Rounder)

Getting these two releases from Mallet and McCutcheon in the same package felt like a test. So, I'll bite - and probably get bit. Mallett has been exploring far beyond the horizon of his beloved "Garden Song." He's traveled many a long hard year since then and it has only sharpened his focus, even when he returns. McCutcheon, on the other hand, delivers another collection of the musical sermons that have become his stock in trade. Most of these songs are formulaic enough that they could have been written in an office, though the liner notes show them scattered all over the heartland like seeds.

Mallett's new work, Ambition, is reminiscent of Steve Gillette at his best. Or maybe the poet Charles Simic is a more accurate comparison. Each song is like a small gem, well-crafted and deceptively small in its scope and ambitions. Even the "hit" song, "Wild in the Sixties," as evocative as it is of that era socially and politically, is really after that lingering feeling of nostalgia that is completely free of longing. It all hinges on one word really: in the chorus, he sings "You're livin' in atime where you don't belong / But you run wild in the sixties." Run, not ran. It's about being still being present, about living in two worlds at once. After all, the sixties were about the future. In all the millenial fever, it's notable how much in the present we are.

The same kind of nostalgia colors "Here in the City Where You Live," in which the traveling singer finds himself in his ex-lover's town with time to kill. There is no regret, just that existential tension between being so close and so far. A metaphor captures the intensity, but also the lack of intention:

I can't help but sometimes wonder
About you far away life
Coming like the sound of thunder on
A warm summer night

"Walkin'" takes up the predicament of a working man, always a step away from being downsized. But this is no tale of woe or righteous indignation or idealistic fervor to make lefty folkies pity him with PC condescension or root for him or want to join him. Whatever the anger or anxiety, "Walkin'," again, is about acceptance. Feel uneasy at the solution, but there is strength in the matter-of-fact attitude of acceptance:

So pass that thing around
Put that hammer down
Tomorrow at this time we could be walkin'

Mallett's strength is being able to hold two ideas, two emotions at the same time. In "Greenin' Up" he returns to the garden farm, but instead of the careful cultivation that made the "Garden Song" a hit with the "Tzena Tzena" crowd, this gardner is content - at least for the moment - to leave the world alone. The horse past it's prime, the bullfrog in a swamp of "fiddleheads and rotten wood," the seeds of "Every little weed / Every little vine." More than the lure of the idle fishing tackle, it's the realization that, without any help from him, "its springtime in the country / And the pasture grass is greenin' up real good."

"Ambition," the song at the center of the album, puts the gardening metaphor in a whole new key - defining the conflict between the man who would shape the world - and his own life - and the man who is increasingly inclined to let it all be:

Ambition
You're my best friend and my worst
Cause you lead me to the fallowed field
And then cut me like a curse

True ambition may be having none, and these songs explore that problem with a simple grace and insight. (-HB)