For those unaware, GRAMMY winner John McEuen’s new album, The Newsman, is a first for the acoustic music legend who helped to define the trajectory for bluegrass and acoustic-rooted music in the mid 1970s as a member of The Nitty Gritty Dirty Band.

The album’s 11 tracks are all spoken word renditions of poems from the 19th and 20th century that McEuen has been collecting over the course of his 50 year career.

Each story is told in McEuen’s engaging baritone, adorned by his unique instrumental compositions informed by his many years of scoring films. From the opening title track, which is a true story about a man who sold newspapers and was a tremendous influence on the young musician in Los Angeles, to the final cut, Julie’s Theme, inspired by Jules Verne telling a friend, in a French cemetery, about his recently deceased young wife, McEuen presents an album of mini-stories at once inspirational and deeply emotional.

1. The Newsman
2. Fly Trouble
3. The Cremation Sam McGee
4. Old Rivers
5. The Guitar of Pineapple John
6. Killed At The Ford
7. Nui Ba Den
8. Red Clay
9. I’ll Be Glad When They Run Out of Gas
10. The Mountain Whippoorwill
11. Jule’s Theme

This wonderfully diligent, and wholly impassioned new album, opens the atmospheric storytelling within The Newsman and the gleefully frenetic Fly Trouble and then brings us the sombre toned telling within The Cremation Sam McGee, the told-with-a-smile Old Rivers and the buoyant The Guitar of Pineapple John.

On what is a most wonderful, fully emboldened recording, along next is the harmonized Killed At The Ford and the Vietnam war story spoken within Nui Ba Den, and then we get the banjo-hued Red Clay, the more upbeat and free flowing I’ll Be Glad When They Run Out of Gas, the album closing on the banjo-delicious The Mountain Whippoorwill and then an aching yearn threads itself lovingly throughout the piano ballad Jule’s Theme.

www.johnmceuen.net