Talk Me Some Sense isn't as overtly odd as
A Bird Named Yesterday, but it's every bit a product of its era as that album, particularly in how it captures the two opposing forces within the folk of the '60s: how the rolling acoustic guitars and heavy harmonies brought folk into the mainstream and how protest songs strived to keep folk topical and out of the mainstream. As a product of RCA Nashville's
Chet Atkins-supervised studios of the '60s,
Talk Me Some Sense is a lush, even luxurious record, as
Bobby Bare's deep baritone is given heavy reverb which gives him plenty of space -- space that's filled with an army of acoustic guitars, vocal harmonies, dobros, strings, horns and harmonicas, giving this a soft, hazy, even impressionistic feel that's enveloping and comforting, even when
Bare is singing about "All the Good Times Are Past and Gone." That song embodies many of the contradictions of
Talk Me Some Sense -- it's lazy but jaunty, sounding rather friendly, even humorous, even though the title spells out clearly the pathos running throughout the song. That's a stronger indication about how the album is multi-layered than how the anti-protest song sentiment of the title song -- where
Bare directly attacks a songwriter who sings "songs of agitation and usin' funny rhymes/The whole new trend and your preachin' friend is a great big waste of time" -- is undercut by how
Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" immediately follows in its wake and then a few songs later, he sings the straight-up protest tune "What Color (Is a Man)." These moves feel so deliberate that it's hard not to think that
Bare is winking when he sings "Talk Me Some Sense," but it's still a masterpiece of lush '60s progressive country in how it tackles big issues with big sounds. The reason the album as a whole works is that same big production, which makes the various strands of the album -- almost all good songs, but not songs that necessarily hold together thematically -- do hold together in the album's warm, overblown way, itself an artifact of the '60s in the best possible sense.