BRENT Cobb didn’t set out to write an album that feels and sounds like the place he grew up.
But now that the grooves have been cut in his debut LP, ‘Shine on Rainy Day’, there’s no denying the people, the places and the vibe of his southcentral Georgia home infuse almost every song.
“It just is Georgia,” Brent says in his musical drawl. “It’s just that rural, easy-going way it feels down there on a nice spring evening when the wind’s blowing warm and you smell wisteria, you know?”
It’s quiet down there where he’s from in Ellaville – population 1,609 – laid back and forgotten in the shadow of Atlanta and Savannah.
The people have blue-collar values and believe in treating your neighbour like you want to be treated. They believe in curses and the dark finger of fate and wield a sharp, dark sense of humour that sustains them through the hardest of times.
Distant radio stations, roadside honkytonks made of cinderblock and back-porch picking sessions heavy on the backbeat predominate under Spanish moss-strewn live oaks and loblolly pines. It was the perfect place to grow up.
‘Shine on Rainy Day’ is an album Brent’s been trying to make for a decade, and was completed by enlisting his cousin and fellow Georgian, Dave Cobb, the Grammy Award-winning producer whose Elektra Records imprint Low Country Sound is home to the album.
Brent wanted to record an album that felt southern, though not the kind of southern you might expect.
Neither southern rock nor mainstream country, the sound sits somewhere on the wide bandwidth that exists between the two.
Cousin Dave helped him find the right vibe, full of blue-eyed soul, country funk and the kind of swamp boogie sounds that predominated pop in the 1960s and early 1970s. There’s a reason Georgia was always on Ray Charles’ mind, after all.
The album carries something of a Southern Gothic narrative, alternating between dark visions and self-deprecating scenes of black humour that bubble up in laugh-or-cry moments.
He chose the album’s title after a friend heard ‘Shine on Rainy Day’ following a family tragedy and mentioned how powerful it was to him.
Like ‘Shine on Rainy Day’, the album alternates between light and dark. In ‘Black Crow’, a doomed soul argues with a laughing crow sitting on a fencepost, ‘Black crow, I ain’t a joke no more!’ before earning a prison sentence in a corner store robbery.
‘Lord’, he sings, ‘I can feel those spirits carrying me down’ before Jason Isbell unleashes a devilish slide guitar line that feels like a Neil Young guitar solo.
The deliciously self-deprecating Diggin’ Holes’ has that giddy AM radio/Gram Parsons feel with dancing music accompanied by dark lyrics that are both funny and painful.
‘I ought to be workin’ in a coal mine/Lord knows I’m good at diggin’ holes’, he croons.
‘Down in the Gulley’ is a sour mash-flavoured short story with a first line worthy of Faulkner or O’Connor: ‘My granddaddy was a good man – no matter what the papers said’.
The dread-filled ‘Let the Rain Come Down’ opens with visions of doom.
“It was the first song I ever witnessed being written in my life,” Brent said. “I was 5-years-old and it was the first time I ever saw snow, too. We were up in Cleveland for Christmas. My uncle had been through this breakup and he was wanting to get the hell out of Cleveland and go to Georgia.
“It’s not as good as it’s going to get,” Brent added about the album. “But if it’s the last thing that I ever do, then thank God I was able to record it because the songs and the production, it was everything I wanted to say. Finally.”
Brent Cobb is live at Bello Bar on Saturday, May 27. Tickets €15 including booking fee are on sale from Ticketmaster.
