When
Steve Goodman died of leukemia at age 36 in 1984, he left a wife and three small daughters. One of those daughters,
Rosanna Goodman, has now served as executive producer and one of the performers on this tribute to her father 22 years later. She has taken anything but a reverent attitude toward interpreting
Goodman's songs, and they are all the better for that. The obscure country, folk, and rock performers who cover
Goodman do so through the prism of the music that has gained critical cachet in the singer/songwriter realm over the last two decades.
Chris Brown, who is all over the album as a producer, arranger, and side musician, steps up to the microphone for "Yellow Coat" and treats it like he's performing
R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion";
Anna Hovhannessian sounds like she's channeling
Lucinda Williams on "A Lover Is Forever"; and
Tony Scherr, accompanying himself only on acoustic bass, makes like
Tom Waits on "Just Lucky I Guess." This may all sound to a
Goodman fan as if violence is being done to his music, and that's true to some extent, but
Goodman's prowess as a craftsman-like songwriter comes across more forcefully when someone tries something different with his work.
Matt Keating and
Emily Spray, for example, bring out the outlaw aspect of "Danger" (which is, after all, about the relationship between a 19-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl), and by singing "Old Fashioned" and "If She Were You" without changing any pronouns,
Ana Egge and
Crescent & Frost, respectively, liberate these songs from strictly heterosexual interpretation.
Rosanna Goodman herself plays it straight with "My Old Man," resisting the urge to update the lyrics, which are about her grandfather. The one thing that's largely missing on this imaginative collection is
Steve Goodman's wicked sense of humor. Even though the set closes with the satiric "Watching Joey Glow,"
Teddy Kumpel's heavy metal rearrangement robs it of its laughs.