Jim Coyle is a guitar and bass playing singer songwriter from the Boston area who describes his music as rootsy Americana.
Actually he covers quite a few styles over the course of thirty four minutes, including rockabilly, folk-blues, bluegrass and even a dash of greengrass (Irish folk) .
There's a cover of The Flatlander's country-rock standard Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown and a traditional Irish instrumental (100 Pipers) complete with tin whistle.
The album closes with another instrumental - I'll See You In My Dreams - a tune from the 1951 film of the same name starring Doris Day.
If there's an underlying theme here, it's centred on the idea that things in the past were somehow less complicated and easier than they are now.
That's certainly the explicit message of Carefree Days and also on Fly, where Coyle wishes he could "turn back the hands of time" to be free of the burdens of the present. What he wants to escape from is detailed in other tunes with self explanatory titles like Struggle And Strife and Hard Times.
The album begins with spoken word intro which actually leads to you to expect a harder-edged take on these issues.
In a world-weary voice, Coyle drawls : "My mind won't let me wait in line......my body ain't moving but my mind keeps on flying ........time is moving so slow; feels like I'm going back in time". There's a mixture of frustration and bitterness in these words which isn't really carried through to the songs themselves.
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The harsh reality of life in a Dirty Town ("I wish I could give this place a goodbye kiss") and the lonesome hungover state of mind in Saturday Blues do enough to make it clear that he has plenty to gripe about but Coyle is not overly inclined to take us too far into this slough of despond.
The aforementioned Carefree Days is quite a chipper banjo ballad while a woozy sax interlude takes any edge off Struggle And Strife to make it more of a jokey sing-along than a despairing lament.
The impatience expressed in the opening track becomes evident in the way Coyle jumps from one style to another as though he is uncertain which one suits his mood best.
This gives the album a frenetic and confusing quality so would be best sampled one track at a time rather than listened to whole.
Jim Coyle on Myspace
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