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Crash Taylor started playing banjo at five years old and began scribbling songs and poems before his tenth birthday. He hasn’t stopped since. His debut album Retired Outlaw isn’t the dawning of a new talent but the culmination of a decades-long arc. The COVID-19 pandemic, as with many things, can claim responsibility for giving Taylor the necessary breathing room to write and record a veritable flood of songs he’s whittled down to ten tracks for this collection. Retired Outlaw is the musical form of turning lemons into lemonade.
One of the album’s chief attractions Taylor’s slightly skewed songwriting perspective and it is apparent from Retired Outlaw’s first song. “Fretboard”. The song’s opening couplet establishes a sense of real stakes and lays down the gauntlet with an audacious rhyme, but there’s so much more. Taylor builds the track around a rough-hewn but striding electric guitar riff. It’s an intensely personal statement and a great way to open this album.
“Idlewild” has a lighter tone. The verses revolve around an acoustic guitar sound though Taylor inflates the chorus to memorable heights. It doesn’t take the song off-course, however. It’s notable how he balances clear pop sensibilities with such an individualistic songwriting aesthetic. A masterful stroke for “Play for Me” is adding perfectly modulated organ fills as color. It helps further fill out the song without ever weighing it down with needless self-indulgence.
Taylor backs up the humor running through “Birthday Suit” with a vibrant rock arrangement. Guitar is the undisputable musical center of the track but it’s never six-string histrionics. A song that, at initial inspection, may sound like a lark is actually one of the more affecting love songs in recent memory. “How Love Grows” has fascinating musical accompaniment; it seems like it’s going to burst but never does. The level of simmering rises and falls throughout the song but this consistent suggestion that the song is about to explode into an emotional torrent is tantalizing. Taylor’s lyric for the track is one of the album’s best.
“Mona Lisa” has polished theatricality but never seems like a put-on. Taylor has a different perspective in each song and his avoidance of any sort of self-parody gives Retired Outlaw’s songs an even more distinctive character. The final lyric-driven number on the release, “Let Him In”, is an unabashed autobiographical number looking back in time on a pivotal person in Taylor’s memory. It boasts another imaginative and dynamic arrangement straddling a line between folk rock and alternative.
The finale “Nuptial Song” is a four minute plus instrumental with a languid and relaxed tempo. Taylor’s intensely melodic guitar runs will be the unquestionable highlight of the song for many listeners and the production highlights its merits. Few, if any, releases this year will be comparable to Crash Taylor’s Retired Outlaw. He definitely occupies his own particular niche in the music firmament while sharing common ground with his contemporaries, but it is his idiosyncrasies that help this collection stand out. It’ll stand for some time to come.
Jennifer Munoz
