The American Way
By TIM DAVID HARVEY
On the opening track of Steven Gene Wold, AKA, Seasick Steve's 2011 album 'You Can't Teach An Old Dog New Tricks', featuring Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones (and a great tour I saw with Pop), the Sonic Soul Surfer gave us all his 'Treasures'. One of the most beautiful beginnings to any album. Here, with the opening title-track to his new and fourteenth album, 'The Last Season Of America', he tunes into a much bleaker picture with his signature homemade guitar you can't find at Fender. "It’s the last season of America/And we’ll never watch again/The show that we loved/And there’ll be no reruns/All the sponsors have gone home/They’re shutting the whole thing down/All that’s left is the theme song," Steve sings, as everything from Richard Nixon to 'The Jetsons' plays on the tube next to him in this lot of abandoned American automobiles, as a train runs through it.
The Man from Another Time doesn't let up with the second song of his first set since 2024's 'A Trip A Stumble A Fall Down On Your Knees'. 'Bad Things' details the time we're living in, right now and the fact that, "we got a criminal/running this place/he got lies/written all over his face/all he wants/is just to divide/he don’t care /if our country live or die/ as long as the money keeps rolling/up to the rich /a keep rolling/without a hitch/I’m gonna sing/bad things." The 'Dog House Music' singer from Oakland, California, at 75-years-young is putting the affairs of his country in the dog house. Some of his fans from far away parts may not be too fond of this, but this Seasick man has never been one to sell out. When he made it big after Jools Holland's annual New Years' Hootenanny and his breakout album, 'I Started Out With Nothin' And I Still Got Most Of It Left', Steve made one extravangant purchase. A John Deere tractor. Then the man who was just 'Happy (To Have A Job') wrote a song about it.
There's an ode to his drummer Dan Magnusson (pulling up his fellow road warrior by the 'Bootstraps') and a song for 'Matilda From Ottawa', but Steve doesn't shy away from the problems at hand. Even when he's giving us the 'Above Ground Boogie', or collaborating with Ricardo Arjona on 'El Camino'. 'Somebody' is another single that stirs, but on the bluesy 'Surf's Flat', he gets instrumental and inspired, with some "oohs" and "ahhs". But for a country that's running and screaming, like Jeff Goldblum once warned, this 'Free Man' asks us to "have mercy." Yet this is more a call to emancipation celebration, rather than the protest prose that plant this album's flag. "Had a manager and an agent/They did nothing but take the payment/Now I manage myself/At least I keep most my wealth." Wise words from the man who once had nothing (and still has most of it left) for all the young and restless artists looking for a break in a world on the take.
The self-dubbed "professional busker" of the blues made this album after he and his wife, Elizabeth, journeyed across America and were met with poverty and pain. "We drove across the country from Miami to LA," Steve says. "We thought we was gonna have an amazing time but we were mostly sad, so much homelessness and division." In a New Orleans bar, the record's title was coined. Now, he's giving it everything he's got. Closing up shop to 'Feel The Sun' on another Seasick signature, Steve sings "don't lose your hope/things gone get better/Yeah, they gotta get better/Don't lose your faith/Yeah, it's the night/but the dawn gotta come/Yeah, day gone come/When the truth will rise up/And again we'll see the sun." And what more do you need, in song, than that? All on this top ten track album from a man we should treasure forever. Just like those times in the tens, that made for the moment of a man like him to show us a better way. A way that can come back here and stay if we still have a little faith. And the hard work that goes into making everything around us better...together. Seasons change.
Playlist Picks: 'The Last Season Of America', 'Bad Things', 'Matilda From Ottawa'.
Spin This: Seasick Steve - 'You Can't Teach An Old Dog New Tricks'
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