“I’ve been traveling all my life in search of whatever I find.”
So states Joe Ely in the Driven to Drive album press, penned with typical panache by Texas music’s homegrown Homer, Joe Nick Patoski. Road songs all recorded at home – that sounds like a Butch Hancock-ism – the Austin troubadour’s 23rd album since 1977 pinpoints his lifelong wanderlust. Impossibly 77 years young while also victim to life-threatening health events during the pandemic, Ely taps one of his truest selves on Driven to Drive.
Recorded and produced locally at his Spur Studios, the thematic collection strips the journeyman Lone Star to his essence. No track features more than three musicians, more than half of these dozen tracks magnetizing musical duets. ATX all-stars Bill Guinn (keyboards), Pat Manske (percussion), Richard Bowden (fiddle), Jeff Plankenhorn overdubbing guitar solos, and, particularly, accordionist Joel Guzman all add accents, but only one instrument dominates. As always, Ely’s rangy, expressive tenor fuses the rootsy resonance of his Panhandle twang to the nervy urban restlessness of the native Amarilloan’s eternally adventurous gusto.
Like July 2021’s superlative Treasure of Love, the most recent time capsule from the Flatlanders – Ely with fellow Lubbock-drawn cohorts Hancock and ATX warbler Jimmie Dale Gilmore – Driven to Drive pulls into its wheelman’s discography stitched together across time and space. Rack ’Em Records, the singer’s personal imprint, continues assembling archival dives including Full Circle: The Lubbock Tapes (2018), demos for his third LP Down on the Drag, and the “digibilly” of B4 84. On all of them, aural eras transcend thanks to Texan roots musics (folk, blues, country, Latin) performed by root instruments (harmonica, mandolin, synthesizer).
Moreover, the Grammy winner, alongside Tex-Mex supergroup Los Super Seven in 1998, trafficks in the Flatlanders’ preternatural gift: wordplay. Some boys play with language rather than guns, although yours truly once watched Ely brandish a shotgun atop his backyard gulch to eradicate a rattlesnake in a riverbed 100 yards below us.
I’m a driving man, I’m a driving man I’m travelin’ light, roaring through the night I’m a driving man
I’m a roving soul, I’m a roving soul I’m a roving soul, down the road I roll I’m a roving soul
“Drivin’ Man” begins the road trip behind an Ely and Guzman pairing, the former’s steady steel rainfall of acoustic guitar and stark lyric offset by the warmth of the latter’s accordion light rays. Nearly reprising the compadres’ 2008 album Live Cactus!, their quartet of duets backbone Driven to Drive. Set them against one-off “Odds of the Blues,” starring the album’s mega cameo, Bruce Springsteen, guesting on a Cannery Row stroll echoing Plankenhorn’s reverberating riffs, Ely’s shadowing bass, and the Boss man’s gruff Ghost of Tom Joad harmonies.
Greatest hit “For Your Love” sounds as tough, driving, and uncompromising as ever, a declaration of love as locomotive as the one it references. Meanwhile, what would an Ely LP materialize without Butch Hancock’s wry, witty, rollicking wisdom? So “Watchin’ Them Semis Roll” trucks in a load of Texan Zen. On “Didn’t We Robbie,” Austin guitar mage and jazz wizard Mitch Watkins cranks chords on an exuberant carny rocker, one of only three tracks featuring drums. “Nashville Is a Catfish” catfishes Nashvegas like the national anthem of dues payin’, relishing an Ely lyric as clever and juicy as a stone country-folk standard covered by Waylon Jennings himself:
Nashville is a fiddle, ain’t no violin Caught in the middle between gospel and original sin
Moaning like an angel stranded on a hardwood floor Caught in the middle between a steeple and barroom door
A big hog word roar (“Ride Motorcycle”), sole solo turn “San Antonio Brawl,” and some Flatlanders-ready Southwestern sauce (“Slave to the Western Wind”) also keep pedal to metal. As such, Driven to Drive floors it from start to stop.
As Ely once told me, “I guess being born on Route 66 destined me to be a highwayman.”
Joe Ely
Driven to Drive
(Rack ’Em Records)
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This article appears in August 9 • 2024.