Review of New Album
Review of New Songs From An Old Place
by Dr.Michael Bader, author
Rick Kirkpatrick has played the guitar for over 40 years. He’s written lots of songs. He’s been a beloved teacher to hundreds of people of all ages and levels for more than a dozen years. He’s performed everywhere and appeared on the albums of other musicians. Finally, however, he’s written, sung and played on, and produced an album of his own—New Songs from an Old Place.
The feeling one gets is of something that’s been pent up in Kirkpatrick for decades that has finally burst forth in a brilliant collection of songs that are, at once, passionate, moving, sometimes melancholic, and yet hopeful about the transcendent power of love. His students, friends, and colleagues are saying: It’s about time!
The album has been worth the wait. All but two songs are original and Kirkpatrick’s lyrics are beautiful. Several are about love, but a love shot through with longing and fear. On Know By Now, he admonishes himself for repeating self-defeating patterns (“you’d think I ‘d know by now…) but pleads now for a new wisdom: “Then one day you came to me, In my heart I made a vow, Lord please don’t let me mess this up, You’d think I’d know by now.”
Kirkpatrick is headed for redemption. In Follow Me Down, he sweetly vows: “Never going back, The air’s too thick, The symphony is here, The river runs so clear…Never going back.”But New Songs from an Old Place is not a collection of what Steve Earle ironically refers to as “chick songs.”
Kirkpatrick rocks. His blues and rock ‘n roll licks are sharp and show off his technical chops. He also includes two songs, probably my personal favorites, that have social and political overtones. The first, Bloodstains in the Sand is a beautiful but somewhat melancholic story of the painful uselessness of war and was inspired and co- written by a veteran of the Iraqi war, John Else. The title pretty much says it all; the bloodstains are both external and internal. It ends with this verse: “Outside the wire, on my way back home, from a fish in a barrel, to feeling all alone. What do I desire, where do I stand. I don’t know why I’m not a bloodstain in the sand.”
His song Black Water Rise isn’t a contemplative protest but a foreboding and angry one, as it decries the human and ecological disaster created by strip mining. The “canary quit singing…….no fish in the creek….poison in the well…..wallet is empty and cupboards are bare.”
Kirkpatrick doesn’t hold back. It’s a song that to me was reminiscent of some of Steve Earle’s more beautiful and powerful songs about the damage done to all of us by unbridled corporate greed. It should be obvious by now that Kirkpatrick – and New Songs from an Old Place — can’t be pigeonholed.
Sometimes he reminds me of Don Henley, but a Don Henley as comfortable with R & B as he is with alternative country. Kirkpatrick has finally decided to show us what he’s got—and it’s plenty. In Rolls Royce Phantom he worries “My memory is fading, of that younger time. Who is that young man now? Has he passed his prime?” The answer is a resounding No. By the look and sound of his new album, Rick Kirkpatrick is finally hitting his stride.
About Michael Bader:
Dr. Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with over 30 years of clinical experience. He received a Doctor of Mental Health degree at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1980. He has written over 50 articles for popular magazines, both print and on-line, including The Huffington Post, Alternet, and Tikkun Magazine.
His website is www.michaelbader.com