Music Road
2009
Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away
About This Album
It is odd that Slaid Cleaves has allowed a bad but wildly popular novelist like Stephen King to write the liner notes for his album Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, since, as a songwriter, he far more closely resembles a good but much less popular short-story writer like Raymond Carver. Of course, when a famous person offers to write an appreciation of you, it's hard to refuse, at least from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately and inevitably, the notes are written in King's semi-literate style; at least they're enthusiastic. Nevertheless, Cleaves continues to make like a Southwest Raymond Carver on Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, his first album of largely new material in five years. People on life's fringes -- including a high-school dropout, a cowboy turned drug runner and illegal-alien smuggler, a woman whose husband is away at war, another woman who's abused by her husband and takes her revenge with a gun, and an executioner recalling the days of public hangings -- tell their stories or have them told by the songs' narrators, sung in Cleaves' drawling tenor. Love and money always seem to run out, and violence is never far away. Drinking and drugging occur frequently.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,7,8,10 and 11)

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