'Going Places' by Josh Rouse
Josh Rouse isn’t really a big-picture songwriter, perhaps in part because his softly grainy voice discourages huge statements, and perhaps in another, more important part because, like Paul Simon in his younger days or Nick Lowe in his later days, he’s a craftsman who understands that humans experience most of their lives in small-scale, ordinary details.
Those details are many and rich on Rouse’s 13th solo album, Going Places, and they form a subtler tribute to his creative influences and evolution than 2003’s bellbottom-besotted 1972 or 2018’s electronically enhanced Love in the Modern Age. They also keep his latest 10 songs in a metaphorical space where he can meet the gaze of almost any spectator.
His opener, “Apple of My Eye,” couldn’t be much more plainspoken: he’s just telling his lady that the titular phrase is what she is to him, while shaking off depression dust, putting on his favorite suit, and taking her out to dance as Jim Hoke’s saxophones and Xema Fuertes’s limpid electric guitar goad him into an easy groove.
Producing and recording at home in Spain, Rouse stays fondly and firmly inside musical comfort zones, whether he’s mixing languorous bongos and dobro with West Coast urbanity in “She’s in L.A.,” gleaning the energy of Jayhawks-style folk-rock (with help from that band’s Gary Louris) on “City Dog,” or shuffling a la the Everly Brothers (and with his wife, Paz Suay) as “The Lonely Postman.”
What the material lacks in adventurousness, it gains in confident technical and emotional execution, plus the curious pleasure of how each song feeds a little into the next, until the album feels as if it could be performed live, in sequence, and thus end beautifully with the There Goes Rhymin’ Simon slyness of “Stick Around.” Going Places takes small pictures,but frames them lovingly.
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