STEVE POLTZ: JoyRide

He’s back! Steve’s got a new album, JoyRide, which dropped on January 30. He’s also got a new home in San Diego after almost 10 years in Nashville. We’re going to feature Steve on the cover of the April edition of the  Troubadour; in the meantime let’s talk about the album.

The first single off the album is the lead-off track “If It Bleeds It Leads,” a classic Poltz chronicle of a night that starts with innocent TV news watching but escalates through yelling, pistols, and a SWAT team, to being featured ON the news. It showcases Steve’s adept finger-picked guitar, his unique casual vocal delivery, with some self-harmonizing and minimalist accompaniment from bass, drums, and Mellotron.

This could serve as a template for the arrangement of the other nine songs on the project; they’re all going to translate easily to Steve’s solo stage show. (In fact, I’ve seen him do several of them live, including “Petrichor,” “Son of God,” and “Brand New Liver.” You can probably find live videos online.) Each track has its own feel, but the arrangements are mostly Steve’s voice and guitar, with a little bass, maybe drums, some keyboard or electric guitar, maybe some harmonies.

The second single is “Love a Little Bigger,” which is not the romantic ballad you might infer, but rather a fast-moving collage of mini-stories involving a cast of dubious characters wielding hunting knives and poisonous snakes, and the timeless advice to “take off your clothes, jump in the river, pack a nice lunch, keep your arrow in your quiver.”

Steve’s been in the thick of the Nashville co-writing party, including shared songs with Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings. There are five co-writes on the album—with Vince Herman (“Love a Little Bigger”), Jim Lauderdale, Gary Nicholson, and Skip Black. Here’s a taste of what I’m hearing on the pre-release album.

“Petrichor” is an attention-grabber, with a galloping unique finger roll on the guitar. Here, Steve joins Lynyrd Skynyrd and Nirvana in giving us a song dedicated to a smell.

“Son of God”
This is textbook (good book?) Poltz, where he tells us about the time he was visited by an encyclopedia salesman who was also the, well, you can guess. It contains the mix of humor and surrealism as you’d expect from the best of Arlo Guthrie. I knew it was genius the first time; I heard it last spring at the Joshua Tree Music Festival (Steve’s playing again this spring). I’m not sure it’s something we’re going to want to hear every spin of the album, but the world is definitely a better place with this piece in it.

“Fixin’ Up”
If you’re still waiting on that romantic ballad, this is not it either. Rather, it’s a hard-luck barroom waltz-time love song.

Let me buy a round of bottom-shelf
You can tell me all about yourself

“JoyRide”
Steve gives us another chapter in the continuing saga of the Touring Musician, following “Wrong Town” off Stardust and Satellites and “Folksinger” off the album of the same name. It’s a 2½ minute list of what you get when you live literally half your life bouncing from stage to stage.

Haircuts and pedal boards
And capos and old cords
Delays and car wrecks
And boring old sound checks…

JoyRide was produced, engineered, and mixed by Dex Green in Nashville. The cover art is by Anna Pollock, who shows us what Peter Max might be doing today, if he’d been micro-dosing continuously since the ’60s.

See Steve on the cover of this magazine in April; catch him around town scoping the waves or eating sushi; experience him on stage at the Belly Up in February and in Joshua Tree in May.