CHUCK LEAH, Road to Medicine Bow

You don’t have to be an Americana music aficionado to find your soul all aglow, equally charmed and intoxicated the minute singer, songwriter, well-traveled troubadour and world-wise Texan storytelling sage Chuck Leah enters your orbit. As evidenced on his eighth and latest/greatest album Road to Medicine Bow, his downright freewheeling coolness comes at you from so many angles, it’s hard to know where to start lavishing admiration.

So let’s just throw it out there - the album is a 7-song, 28- minute, short and sweet, enrapturing Nashville-crafted miracle featuring colorful, quirky yet relatable characters, sweeping Old West landscapes and hopeful tinges of romance amidst a dry sea of loneliness, longing and old fashioned messed up bad luck. There’s a been there, lived in feeling to the music, but these would be mere grand poetic narratives without the second prominent and praiseworthy feature of the Leah experience – his voice!  

Telling a story all their own, those vocals are as dusty as those vistas he sings so insightfully about, scratchy as a favorite old 45 you just found in storage, but warm, inviting and quietly irresistible. What Leah lacks in range he makes up for with passion and emotional urgency – and pointed narratives that keep us enthralled and lines that keep us hanging on until the next one. Imagine if Kenny Rogers went into the studio hoarse one day and recorded the most raw, heartfelt song of his life. That’s the magic. On Road to Medicine Bow,

Leah’s got the brilliantly intuitive Music City elite (we’ll give them their kudos later) gathered at the iconic Blackbird Studio A (and East West Studio 2 in L.A.), with 7x Grammy winning engineer/co-producer Brian Vibberts executing the vision of Leah and fellow co-producers Greg Scelsa, Matt B and Jeff Victor. But without that gripping Leah rasp, and his excellent bass and acoustic and electric guitar skills, it would just be another session featuring masters of their craft. It’s how they bring Leah World to life that matters.    

In musing about his previous album Lolo, Montana, Leah asked rhetorically, “Who on earth would ever attempt to write songs about a remote mountain community that was first discovered when Lewis and Clark made it to Lolo Pass in 1805. Lolo seems like a great place to get lost.” He brings the same sense of unusual but fascinating history to Road to Medicine Bow, whose title song and overall musical aesthetic are inspired by another of his super cool factors. While many indie artists keep their day jobs under wraps, Leah is prouder than heck of his work as a paleontologist (yep, the guy digging up ancient dinosaur bones) and work as Assistant to the Curator at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  

The stark lonesome plucking of Scott Eric Olivier’s slide guitar sets the stage for the album’s majestic opening title track, a slow-simmering, mid-tempo ballad sharing a sensitively told, heartbreaking but then cautiously hopeful epic romantic tale. Because it’s about a paleontologist who loves a stunning Arapaphoe woman (a “dark eyed pert dressed in beads and a buckskin shirt”) he met in Wyoming’s dinosaur country, one clever writer called the track, “A Love Song 100 Million Years in the Making.” Few lyrics in country music can match the lovelorn freshness of “All my wants and woes, they seem to vanish in her gaze” Another powerful, insightful line can be interpreted literally or metaphorically: “Bones and stones lie silent keeping secrets in their graves.” And hope springs eternal in the oft repeated refrain, “I bet what’s left of my soul and a pocket of gold/I’ll see her on the road to Medicine Bow.

Without Leah’s awesome “other” career, there’s no way the song, and by extension the album of likeminded songs following it, would exist. Let’s let the troubadour tell the tale about the impact being a paleontologist has had on his songwriting: “It is a completely different creative outlet for me. I have always drawn inspiration from the colors and sounds from the West. So, working in those environments naturally conjures up music and stories. The inspiration for Road to Medicine Bow came from when I was out digging with my friends Tom and Jeff… at the historic Bone Cabin Quarry near the town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. About 130 years ago, paleontologist with The American Museum (NY) were scouting land in Wyoming, when they came across a sheepherder who had built a makeshift shelter for his sheep out of dinosaur bones.

“He lead them to the location where he found the bones, and some of America’s early dinosaurs came from the area,” Leah adds. “Even to this day, it is a very harsh and isolated area. Nearby are the Como Bluff Mountains where the outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid from the law regularly. There’s also an indigenous camp where various tribes lived and hunted throughout the years. And finally the closest town, Medicine Bow. There is a small church, now a museum, a train stop, and a hotel called The Virginian. One of the very earliest Western novels, The Virginian by Owen Wister, is said to have been written there. So basically the paleontologists would have to load whatever fossils they excavated, load them on to wagon, pass the camp, ride about 20 miles to Medicine Bow, and load them on to the train, where they would be delivered to NY for study and preparation for exhibition. Wandering the area, I imagined a paleontologist falling in love with a Arapaho woman and hoping to see her on the road to Medicine Bow.”

Leah continues his hypnotic Wyoming centric travelogue on “Homa Hills,” an exquisite, deeply soulful and passionately longing ballad that feels like it could be a sequel to “Road to Medicine Bow” with its repeated mentions of “Arapahoe” and expressions of traveling throughout the region. Leah is an excellent hook writer, and this one – “Oh run back home to me” – is a plea to his love to return. But in a sense, wherever he goes, she’s always with him in spirit: “Where I travel, baby, you still go.”    

Another crafty burst of geographical offbeatness hat will get listeners googling is the first line of one of my personal favorites here, “Broke Foot Blues,” a raucous, festive, fiddle fired (courtesy of the amazing Grammy winning violinist Nathalie Bonin) romp that sounds like the kind of jam you might hear when you pull into a packed bar in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. Leah sets the scene with, “It all started in Abiquiu, I guess the spring or summer of ’22,” a reference to a small village an hour north of Santa Fe, known for its stunning landscapes and the home of Georgia O’Keefe. This one showcases his sense of humor as he weaves a tale of lighthearted jealousy about his pal Dave, whose broken foot gains him sympathy from all the chicks – while his own broken toe gets crickets. The singalong chorus is the perfect lament for life and love: “It’s so hard to play the game.” Indeed!

While the most enjoyable way to experience the spell Leah casts here is a straight through listen from title track to the acoustic, apology filled and whiskey-soaked hard luck closer “My Beat- Up Truck” (laced throughout with multi-keyboardist Jeff Victor’s lilting accordion), there are any number of excellent entry points. Try, for instance, the blues and gospel influenced “1018 (See Me),” whose killer, brass-driven and vocal textured “la la la” outro makes this Leah’s own personal “Hey Jude”-like crowd pleaser. The celebratory vibe of that part goes a long way toward healing the protagonist from his “time in a cell,” where he “had my misfortune and my share of hell,” and wondering why the object of his affection doesn’t “see me.” (By the way, I’d love to hear a mashup between this gem and The Who’s “See Me, Feel Me” from Tommy).

Deeper in the tracking, Leah blesses/graces us with another classic-styled, shimmering brass and gospel vocal choir buffeted country/blues ballad in “Matter of Time,” which is wholly original to Leah but whose rising horns coupled with Leah’s rasp make it sound like the best overlooked outtake of Joe Cocker’s career! It’s another one of those tragic songs that makes you feel good, using music to give us hope when we’re processing lyrics about “blood shot eyes,” “two-dollar dreams,” “it’s all wrong” and the infinite sorrow of the key line “It’s just a matter of time, while sweet love it goes waltzing by.”

While he’s quite obviously a master balladeer, Leah saves some of his most infectious songcraft for the rollicking (dare we say, funky?), high octane “I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye,” which finds him practically willing, through the sheer force of the groove, to get the girl to stay just to hear him out one more time even if she’s been pulling away for a while. That’s the full artfulness of the singer, prominently putting his masterful cheery hook-ability to use in a song about a relationship that’s troubled. When he sings, “It’s getting there,” we’re left to wonder just where “there” is for these two, But we’re so happily stoned on his barn burning chorus, it really doesn’t matter.

Including musicians mentioned previously, Leah’s incredible ensemble here includes Shawn Camp (Acoustic Guitar, Mandolin), Aaron Sterling (Drums, Percussion), Scott Eric Olivier (Acoustic, Electric, Baritone, and Slide Guitars, Mandolin), Nathalie Bonin (Violin), Jeff Victor (Piano, Wurlitzer, B3 Hammond Organ, Accordion), Tess Remy-Schumacher (Cello), Joe Savage (Pedal Steel), April Henry (Vocals), Kris Angelis (Vocals) and  Annemarie Picerno (vocals).

“My favorite part of making records is the creative hang,” say Leah. “I love my band…best band in the world. I started producing my own records around High Stakes (2015)…I think Road to Medicine Bow is a natural evolution to my story. It was a privilege to have my friends Greg Scelsa, Jeff Victor, Matt B and Brian Vibberts produce this record with me. I think now, at age 52, I feel bold and tough enough to take risks.. to turn away from technology and rely on storytelling and amazing musicians. It’s an important bragging right to say, I created this and not AI or anything else. This was recorded by all of us in the same room, having a great time, and I think the record reflects that.”