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Artist
Michael Tarbox
10+ albums
bluesgospel
about
Michael Tarbox leads The Tarbox Ramblers, a band best known for a roughhewn sound drawing equally from American gothic, Appalachian and paleo-blues traditions. But with “My Primitive Joy,” his solo debut, the music has begun to change. Recorded this spring in a converted pharmacy on the outskirts of Nashville, his new album bypasses the Ramblers’ backwoods squall entirely. Instead Tarbox gives us an ambitious set of performances centering on acoustic songs – many of them brief - with understated melodies and spare arrangements. With its smattering of piano, trumpet, pedal steel, “My Primitive Joy” is a far cry from what we’ve come to expect from Tarbox and his group. Or is it? Asked to address the question over lunch in a tumbledown Cambridge eatery, Tarbox laughed and said he sees only continuity between his older and newer work: “You can reshuffle the deck, but the cards don’t change. My influences are always with me, so the form the music takes doesn’t really matter as much as its spirit. The new songs might sound different, but they all come from the same place.” He has a point. The fatalism of the old songs Tarbox loves is everywhere on “My Primitive Joy.” Hopes and attachments are fraught, and when Tarbox sings “this world and all its danger soon may fall away” it’s tough to say whether he sees respite or calamity coming his way. But if his outlook’s provisional, it’s also true that many of these songs look towards renewal, romantic and otherwise. The world may be a
