You do get to thinking that you wouldn’t be able to drive down a street in Texas without knocking a good old fashioned country style singer songwriter down. So and verily and as that thought sinks under the combined weight of whisky and beer, we come to Carrie Elkin and her album “Call It My Garden” and, yes, she’s a good old fashioned country singer songwriter from Texas.
It would, of course, also be easy to file Ms Elkin under the fashionable Americana banner but she isn’t really one to dwell on the past like other practitioners of that nouveau genre. While she does indeed smile affectionately on that old time religion in “Guilty hands”, she does not dwell on such things and easily her turns her curiously effective lyrical mix of realism and sentimentality to such modern matters as relationships (“Lift Up The Anchor”) and the darkness that follows the twists of fate to be found in a life without luck (“Shots Rang Out”).
Carrie Elkin is an easy going troubadour telling her stories in song with humanity and an appealingly understated style. As such, she readily brought comparisons to Nancy Griffith and even early Dolly Parton to mind.
Talking of Dolly Parton, how do you tell Americana from country? You know its country if it makes you want to be Dolly Parton’s guitar. Carrie Elkin makes me want to be Dolly Parton’s guitar.