Like a select group of his peers (notably Howe Gelb, Chuck Prophet and Jon Dee Graham), Walter Salas-Humara has carved out several niches which allow him to continue a recording career: solo troubadour, band leader, painter, spoken-word collaborator.
Walterio, the latest album in a career that reaches back to The Silos in 1985, finds Salas-Humara’s arc at an all-time high. By now, he has presented himself in enough guises to demonstrate all that really matters is the song. Several years ago at Linneman’s, backed by locals The Carolinas, Salas-Humara scorched the stage in a way that would have made teenage rockers blush. Since then he has returned to play house concerts as a duo with accordionist Jonathan Rundman that reflect the intensity of intimate communication.
Opening with “El Camino de Oro,” which along with “Hecho en Galicia” references home and community, the Florida-reared artist pays homage to his Spanish and Cuban elders. Community looms large here; of the album’s 10 songs the only one not a co-write is a pat mAcdonald cover and four of the co-writes were composed at mAcdonald’s annual Steel Bridge Songfest, held in Sturgeon Bay.
“Will You Be Ready” alludes to the impermanence of ruling parties while “Here We Go” is a shot of sheer exuberance in the joys of finding “the lost chord, the perfect wave, the cafes of Amsterdam, hippies trails of Afghanistan, a hundred miles up the Amazon, Tangier in the market stalls, Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields, night train to Marrakech, feed the poor in Bangladesh.” Salas-Humara’s open-ended list of reference points is invigorating.
Humor leavens the record on “She’s a Caveman,” co-written with 15-year-old Tarl Knight and “Out of the Band” co-written with novelist Jonathan Lethem. The latter a song about a song, wherein the irony of a band’s most requested tune was written by the guy they kicked out—and are now sentenced to play it every night. The album’s lodestar, the reflective “Come in a Singer,” could be Salas-Humara’s mission statement, depicting the desire to create and the need to be remembered. Critics be damned.
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