This One's For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark

I review music for a living, so I hear a lot of good tunes all the time. For my money, "This One's For Him" is the best CD of 2011. The artists who contributed to this collaboration brought their A-games to the studio to honor Clark, the dean of Texas music, who turned 70 last month.

Sorry this review is so long, but since everyone did such a good job, I think they should each get a mention.

Fellow Texan Rodney Crowell kicks things off with a solid cover of "That Old Time Feeling," followed by Lyle Lovett's brilliant turn on the 3/4 time "Anyhow I Love You." Both Crowell and Lovett gave smooth and polished performances at the tribute show in Austin on Nov. 2, with Lovett taking time to credit Clark with jumpstarting his career.

"Without Guy Clark, there would have been no Lyle Lovett," he said. "Before he even met me, he was telling everyone about my demo tape."

Shawn Colvin's sly "All He Wants is You" will make you rethink Clark's crusty...Read more

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Various Artists
"THIS ONE'S FOR HIM: A TRIBUTE TO GUY CLARK"
(Icehouse Music, 2011)
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It's hard to imagine anyone more deserving of a top-flight tribute album than country-folk composer Guy Clark, who started his career in the early 1970s as one of the young turks of the Texas outlaw-folkie scene and has stood for decades as one of Americana's leading lights.

The wealth of this talent on this 2-CD set is nothing short of astounding, folks like Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle Joe Ely, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, and Willie Nelson, just to name a few. The roster is impressive, but so is the fact that so many of these artists are longtime friends and fans of Clark and his songs; leading this list is Jerry Jeff Walker, another Texas-indie icon whose version of "LA Freeway" was a signature song of the Americana scene before it...Read more

Is there anyone anywhere who's a better songwriter than Guy Clark? This is music that's fundamentally human, will strike chords with anyone anywhere, by artists who are the all the best at what they do. Down home in sentiment, cosmopolitan in universality. Thanks Guy.