Greg Graffin - “Cold As The Clay”

My latent love of American roots music has blossomed and soared in recent years. Thankfully, the independent music scene appears to have shared my secret love and has produced a glut of bands performing roots-inspired music; and while some see this as an unfortunate trend, the realization that you can create a blazing punk rock song by throwing some distortion and forbidden beat drums behind nearly any song from the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie has led me to explore the depths of the past, digging through my parents tapes to find those artists which are past that capture my imagination.

And then Greg Graffin has to write an album that takes me out of the tape bins and into the present. In what many will consider a sequel to his American Lesion project, Cold As The Clay delivers an honest, heartfelt collection of classics and originals that feel as at home in my small apartment in San Francisco as they would in my parents’ old VW van or on the porch of our house in West Virginia. Many, including myself, expected his duets on this album with vocalist Jolie Holland to result in a mainly female fronted affair, but instead gives us a beautiful, harmonious melding of Graffin’s deep and rough around the edges moan with Holland’s smooth as silk vocal delivery.

While our beloved neighbors to the North, the Weakerthans, make an appearance on the album as Graffin’s backdrop on his originals, this is not simply Graffin taking John K’s place. Instead, Graffin and friends write songs calling to mind the folk heroes of the past, bringing Neil Young through the vocals most often and many varying shades of my parents’ broken stereo that lulled me to sleep on twelve-hour cartrips in my youth. The other half of the album features mostly classic songs retooled by Graffin and his backing group of Joe Wack, Chris Berry and David Bragger. While the two halves of the album are told by completely different arrangements of musicians, partner-in-crime Brett Guerewitz has blended them together seamlessly to present a complete document for the listener.

While Graffin hasn’t rewritten the book on American folk music, he definitely has added a worthy chapter to it. As a unabashed non-fan of Bad Religion, I went into this skeptical to say the least, and came out with a burgeoning desire to see this songs performed in a live setting, be it in a tasteful club, a dirty basement or a sunny park. While most will be snapping this up and praising it due to it’s punk rock pedigree, they’ll be missing the true charm of this album: it ignores the expectations that come with being “Greg Graffin of Bad Religion” and embraces the desires and needs of “Greg Graffin the Musician.”

Originally written for Punknews.org, but not published.