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In 2008 Austin’s Jim Patton and Sherry Brokus stepped away from the full band sound of their previous recordings with their band Edge City to release an album under their own names that reflects the kind of sound they make as a duo or trio when they play in acoustic settings like the Cactus in Austin, Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta, Anderson Fair in Houston, the Bluebird in Nashville, Uncommon Ground in Chicago, or house concerts from Austin to Bar Harbor to Baltimore. “Plans Gang Aft Agley” was produced by Ron Flynt and is based around Patton’s heartfelt, character driven songs and the wall of sound vocal interplay between Patton and Brokus. In addition to Patton on guitar and Flynt on bass and keyboards, the new CD features performances from Rich Brotherton, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Warren Hood, and John Bush. In Patton’s recent songs, a man discovers alternate definitions of success; a daughter waits in a bar for the father who walked out on her years ago; a father tells his child not to make the same mistakes he did; a brave woman breaks free of an abusive past; people fall in love; relationships end; relationships endure. Patton cites 20th century American fiction (“from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner to Kerouac and Salinger and Raymond Chandler”) and the various lives of the friends he grew up with in Maryland (“I knew doctors and lawyers and waitresses and teachers and water rats and gravediggers and the guy who drove the truck that emptied the port-o-pots all over the state”) as the main source of his lyrical inspiration. Patton and Brokus have sung together for over twenty five years, and confess to listening to a lot of “Richard & Linda Thompson, the Byrds, X, the Airplane, the Everly Brothers, and Emmy Lou Harris singing with Bob Dylan” when they started, before they took off in a direction “that’s pretty much our own”. |
