Townes Van Zandt Rear View Mirror CD

Personnel: Townes Van Zandt (vocals, guitar); Danny Rowland (guitar); Owen Cody (fiddle).
Includes liner notes by John Conquest.
All songs written by Townes Van Zandt.
Contains bonus tracks not available on the domestic release.
Personnel: Townes Van Zandt (vocals, guitar); Danny Rowland (guitar); Owen Cody (fiddle).
In 1990, Townes Van Zandt was working on a three-CD retrospective for which he was re-recording much of his repertoire. That album never appeared, but in 1993, the tiny Austin-based Sundown label released Rear View Mirror, a 17-track album running nearly 58 minutes and containing newly recorded versions of Van Zandt songs dating back to 1968. Though a cover note claims "unique instrumentation," that seems to consist of only of an occasional second guitar and a fiddle. (Sparse applause indicates the recording had been made in a club.) Many of Van Zandt's best-known songs are included -- "Pancho & Lefty," "If I Needed You," "To Live Is to Fly," "Tecumseh Valley," and others -- and while this is not the best set of recordings of those songs, the tendency of Van Zandt's albums to go out of print might mean this is the only one you would find in your nearest record bin, in which case the album is highly recommended. ~ William Ruhlmann
Van Zandt, the original Texas Troubadour, courted death most of his life. One of his earliest songs was called "Waitin' Round To Die," and he titled one of his albums THE LATE GREAT TOWNES VAN ZANDT. So when a lifetime of hard living finally caught up with him on New Year's Day 1997, the grim visions that made up his oeuvre seemed like nothing so much as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Though the 1993 live album REAR VIEW MIRROR was on Sugar Hill's reissue schedule for months prior to the singer's death, its release only weeks afterward has left the album with a eulogistic feel.
The songs on REAR VIEW MIRROR brim with wit, wisdom and striking poetic imagery. The sound is a combination of Hank Williams' haunted wail and Bob Dylan's surreal balladry. Though there are glimpses of pure beauty ("If I Needed You," "Don't You Take It Too Bad"), most everywhere Van Zandt looks, he encounters a new kind of nightmare. In "Our Mother The Mountain," he's visited by a demonic woman whose "flesh turns to splinters." Most tellingly, in "Lungs," while dreaming of taking the moonlight home with him, he reminds himself that his "hands will turn to butter, better leave this dream alone, try to find another."