The very title Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me conjures the ghost of Kris Kristofferson, echoing "The Junkie and the Juicehead, Minus Me," so it shouldn't come as a great surprise that Waylon Payne is an outlaw in an unconventional sense. He's not filled with macho bravado, he's an eccentric poet navigating the byways separating the country music styles of Nashville and Texas, writing songs pulled from his life but not chained to it. Appropriately, Blue Eyes strolls along at a leisurely, contemplative pace -- a tempo that allows Payne to tease out melodies as he lingers upon his stories. Occasionally, he kicks proceedings into a higher gear -- "Sins of the Father" gets the album off to a deceptively rowdy start -- but Payne wrote Blue Eyes as a way of working through his own struggles, coming to terms with loss and addiction, so it fits that the record proceeds at its own gait. This doesn't mean the album is slow, though. Payne's ballads often simmer with an undercurrent of soul and there's a narrative force not just in the individual songs, but in how they're sequenced. It's an album where the songs build upon each other, leading to the gentle closer "Old Blue Eyes," a tune that gains power from the 11 songs that proceed it. As literary as Blue Eyes can be, it's not pretentious. Payne writes and sings with the earthiness of a troubadour who has roamed America, eventually finding his voice and his direction. That hard-earned quality gives Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me a considerable emotional resonance; its feelings are earned, not faked.
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