'Write about what you know', is a familiar tip handed out to aspiring authors and songwriters.
For the most part, following this advice is easier said than done but Rod Picott pulls it off effortlessly on his seventh album.
He draws upon his experience as a construction worker and sheetrock hanger in Maine and writes songs that relate the tough lessons he learnt from this back-breaking and knuckle-bloodying labour.
"Some things you're born, some things you've gotta learn" he sings on the title track which interweaves his own life story with that life of his father, a former Marine and a welder at the Navy Yard.
Picott doesn't stoop to cheap sentiment or try to romanticise the life of the working man. There is, for example, the sad recognition that people like him may dream of escaping from the rut but are, for the most part, trapped in a blue-collared loop because it's the only life they know.
On the track Sheetrock Hanger he sings "I coulda gone to school, but I went to work, to get some drinking money, like all the other jerks" and in the same song he reflects with grim humour: "When I'm dead and gone, if I don't get wings, I'll be hanging sheetrock instead".
Sheetrock, by the way, is the brand name for a product produced by the U.S. Gypsum Company. The job of hanging the large and heavy pieces is a backbreaking alternative to wallpaper.
Economic downturns, however, can and do make change inevitable whether you like it or not. The opening track - Rust Belt Fields - tells how closing factories and downsizing can turn once vibrant streets into ghost towns.
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Workers become disposable due to firms' ruthless pursuit of higher profit margins and cheaper labour. Picott notes bitterly that "No one remembers your name just for working hard". The song 410 wryly suggests alternative employment as an armed robber, a notion which typifies Picott's pragmatism.
The voice of these ten songs is very much his own although three - Welding Burns, Rust Belt Fields and Black T-Shirt - were co-written with long-time collaborator Slaid Cleaves. Picott plays acoustic guitar and piano and is backed by accomplished musicians with the slide guitar of Will Kimbrough and fiddle playing of Amanda Shires being particularly noteworthy.
When not singing of employment or the lack thereof, he turns an equally unflinching eye on his own weaknesses (Jealous Heart) or writes the kind or raw-edged love songs you associate with Steve Earle (Still I Want You Bad).
In Your Father's Tattoo, he presents a warts and all portrait of his Dad which also traces the record's key themes of how the big issues like truth, identity and mortality have to be accommodated within the daily grind.
There's a harsh beauty to Picott's songs and this album is highly recommended for those who like songsmiths who tell it like it is.
Rod Picott's Website
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