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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Adam Hill
Them Dirty Roads
Independent
"The road is life," Jack Kerouac once quipped and if the late novelist were to meet singer/songwriter Adam Hill, he might say he's someone who is truly living. In the spirit of Twain's Huck Finn, Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Woody Guthrie's real life travels down the American highway, Hill is a man who's not afraid of the road. In fact, whether he's trekking alone across the midnight blacktop, hanging out with bakers in cafés or seeing the future in the reflection of a single streetlamp, Hill's most alive when he's traveling. On the Seattle-bred singer's sophomore album Them Dirty Roads, he demonstrates how the road has finely tuned his powers of observation. Whether he's singing of a fair-haired baker ("Angeline The Baker"), being threadbare and wasted in Wyoming ("Wyoming Skies") or emotionally fraught in the fog of the Bay Area ("Golden State"), Hill brings to his compositions a literary sensibility that makes every number seem like a short story or an excerpt from a novel. Even though on "Golden State" he sings, "On a foggy day in Northern California/I nearly lost track of my hands/Because of a siren spinning," Hill's not the kind of guy who's disoriented for long. In fact, he finds his footing mid-song, philosophically adding, "It's all right to look the other way/But it's all night 'till the days break down/And you're left running round town/With a ring for a crown/And you should've gotten away." There's much to admire here: the rootsy, fast-talking "High Road" which brings to mind the freewheeling work of Corb Lund; the snarling "Fueled Up" and the elegant chamber folk of "Fools Gold." Elsewhere, "The River Where She Sleeps" is a spry and winning track that somehow references Allen Watts and The Beatles and "Ribbons And Curls" is both wistful and wise. (www.misteradamhill.com)
—Alex Green
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