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Brooklyn-born Scott Martin is a singer, guitarist, session musician, songwriter, and producer who has charted a successful and varied career over the last twenty years. Previously a member of Bulletproof Messenger, he now fronts Scott Martin & The Grand Disaster. Their eponymous debut album was released on June 9, 2023. Martin wrote each of the nine tracks, which feature assured lyrics combined with rich, layered melodies. Many of the songs focus on love lost and found and emerge from a covid-era hiatus in which Martin honed his skills, took stock, and recalibrated his career.
The album has an epic quality that acknowledges core influences such as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and U2, while fashioning an original, vital sound. This is classic driving music that can break your heart while also making you want to get in your car and drive Route 66 straight through from Joplin, Missouri to Santa Monica, California. The reverberating delays in the lead single Head Over Heels give a big assist as the song deftly pulls off the difficult trick of making a big, arena-worthy love song sound as hopeful and delicate as a new romance.
The covid pandemic threw the United States into a spin that has yet to stop. This is a weird cultural moment wherein everything we used to take for granted seems askew, unsettled, and uncertain. The fantastic Bringing Hollywood Back to Life (track 4) captures that feeling of being an exile on main street, caught between the past and the future. If our options are to “spend forever bringing Hollywood back to life” or to chart a new course, which one do we take?
This seems to me a particularly important question for classic rock and its fan base. So many of us grew up worshipping groups like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. Those guys loomed large in the culture and on the stage. Listen to the opening notes of Kashmir, for example: it sounds like a T-Rex waking up and stomping on a city. That music was BIG. But as the great generation of rock begins to wind down, how do younger musicians carry this music forward and ensure that it thrives in an era drowning in content?
In a recent interview, Martin emphasizes that the only real choice for those who grew up on the magic of rock music is to keep the faith:
I’m driven to keep it alive and kicking because it’s just what lives inside me – I simply have to write it, I have to play it…if I don’t, it’s like I’m not watering the garden. Banging out a big kerrang-ing guitar part onstage slinging a telecaster? Nothing like it. There is no better feeling in the universe – and I hope people and artists will want to keep that feeling alive, too.
Among a set of great rock songs that do sound big, SLO (track 8) is a surprise. Here, Martin slows things down and leavens the mix with country-inflections reminiscent of Gram Parsons, Tom Petty, or Keith Richards in the Beggar’s Banquet era. Mournful and beautiful at the same time, SLO makes one hope that Martin & The Grand Disaster will explore this road again.
The album is expertly produced and falls on the right side of the line between radio-friendly and slick. Other superb tracks include Rock ‘N’ Roll Heart, Mexico (with that lilting piano that reminds one a bit of Elton John), and Old New York. Like the best albums of the 1970s in this genre, it is assured, cohesive, and—in the best possible way—listenable. There is not a dud track on this thing.
In 2017, author David Hepworth released Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, followed in 2018 by Steven Hyden’s Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock. Rock has been on the defense lately, and both these essential books try to unravel why this music—and those musicians—mattered so much to so many of us. Scott Martin & The Grand Disaster know this history, indeed are steeped in it.
Yet though their album acknowledges the past, it is not stuck there. Based on the evidence of this album, Scott Martin & The Grand Disaster know exactly what they are doing. This album deserves a large audience and suggests that reports of the death of rock were greatly exaggerated. Rock music is in good hands.
Written by Amy Lynn Fletcher
