Joe Ely – Driven to Drive (2024) [FLAC 24bit/48kHz]

Joe Ely – Driven to Drive (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 40:16 minutes | 481 MB | Genre: Country, Rockabilly
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rack ‘Em Records

Twenty-three albums and several million miles after he first hit the road, Joe Ely presents his first road album Driven to Drive. The collection of songs about and inspired by motorized travel was curated by Ely, who in the mid-1970s swept off the flat plains of the Llano Estacado of West Texas like a whirling tornado, fronting a legendary band that was too rock for country, and too country for rock. The wild, wide-open honky-tonk roadhouse sound of the Joe Ely Band gave their hometown of Lubbock its first music hero since Buddy Holly.The project stitches together recordings made at Spur Studios, his home recording facility outside of Austin, over several decades, assisted by musician/neighbors Joel Guzman on accordion, keyboardist Bill Guinn, singer Eddie Beethoven, and fiddler Richard Bowden. Last year at The Zone in Dripping Springs, Texas, Jeff Plankenhorn added his guitar to three tracks and engineer Pat Manske, who mastered Driven to Drive, added percussion.Movement in these songs is measured in many ways: cars, sixteen-wheelers, motorcycle, Greyhound bus. There are pedal-to-the-metal anthems ginning down a straight strip of two-lane blacktop; a lazy meander on the Gulf blues highway; a tale of going on the lam on the Interstate; stories of getting from Here to There, and songs about going nowhere at allThe Lord of the Highway is calling. Joe Ely wants to take you for a ride.Texas music hero Joe Ely has always been a storyteller at heart. Even back in the days when he had hot guitar players and rocked up songs like “Are You Listenin’ Lucky?” and “Cool Rockin’ Loretta,” Ely was telling original tales filled with memorable characters. Now nearing 80, and having survived recent health scares, Ely announces that he’s still got more to say with this upbeat collection of new and old road songs. What’s apparent from the opening lines of the first track “Drivin’ Man,” a song first recorded on his 1988 album Dig All Night, is that Ely’s underrated voice is in fine shape, continuing to communicate emotion with the same force and conviction. “I’m a roving soul,” he testifies. Bruce Springsteen, his duet partner on the slow, pulsing “Odds of The Blues,” speaks to the respect Ely has among his peers even though he has never had a hit single.

Driven to Drive is mostly a solo album of Ely with an acoustic guitar. Recorded in his home studio, Ely is joined in places by guitar players Jeff Plankenhorn and Mitch Watkins, as well as longtime friend and accordionist Joel Guzman. As a vivid reminder of what a great songwriter—full of humor and insight—Ely has always been, he revisits “For Your Love,” also from Dig All Night. The song opens with clever, urgent twists, “For your Love/ I’d rope the moon/ Put it in a blender/ Mix up a concoction/ Bound to make you surrender/ I’d rob me a gin mill and fill the ocean full/ I’d take on the army, her majesty’s marines/ Your love ain’t just the cover/ It’s the whole magazine.” Any notion that Ely has given up rockin’ entirely is dispelled by “Didn’t We Robbie” where Ely—who in 1984 released Hi-Res, one of the first roots rock albums to use synth drums—plays snappy electric drums as he recounts his touring years as the literal lord of the highway. A Lone Star troubadour adds a welcome new chapter as he continues to build his legend. – Robert Baird

Tracklist:

1-1. Joe Ely – Drivin’ Man (03:57)
1-2. Joe Ely – Odds of the Blues (feat. Bruce Springsteen) (04:24)
1-3. Joe Ely – For Your Love (03:22)
1-4. Joe Ely – Watchin’ Them Semis Roll (02:00)
1-5. Joe Ely – Didn’t We Robbie (04:10)
1-6. Joe Ely – Nashville Is A Catfish (03:17)
1-7. Joe Ely – Ride Motorcycle (03:09)
1-8. Joe Ely – San Antonio Brawl (03:09)
1-9. Joe Ely – Slave to the the Western Wind (03:04)
1-10. Joe Ely – Gulf Coast Blues (03:45)
1-11. Joe Ely – Driven to Drive (02:55)
1-12. Joe Ely – Jackhammer Rock (02:58)

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