Gabe Lee has managed to package deal a prayer, a reality, and a dream in a single album. Drink the River, his fourth studio album, delivers this trifecta by way of every of its 9 songs, doling them out in a means that appears like each a fever and a fairytale.
He’s right here to inform tales, in any case. Particularly, ones he’s collected since Farmland in 2019 and left Nashville, solely to return again once more. Whereas his 2022 album The Hometown Child solidified Lee as one of many metropolis’s most promising contenders, Drink the River is a declaration of his promise to grow to be one of many heartland’s best storytellers.
The album pulls again the instrumentals in favor of the fiddle, mandolin, and banjo, digging into the bluegrass affect that has at all times traced Lee’s work and showcasing a few of the greatest string gamers on the town together with Grand Ole Opry members Jason Curler and Eamon McLaughlin.
“I wished to refine the tales. I wished to get actually gritty, I wished folks to listen to these phrases, and actually really feel one thing… And that’s why we stripped it,” Lee tells Rolling Stone. “We scaled all of it the best way again to simply acoustic devices for probably the most half and it’s lovely… I believe we succeeded in capturing that respect for language, respect for storytelling, on this report.”
The album sweeps open with “The Wild,” an ode to the incessant search to interrupt freed from actuality’s “gravity.” The tempo gently lifts as Lee sings, “I’m a reckless youngster, born to the wild/A set of damaged wings, falling out the tree/If I have been heaven despatched, would I be so hellbent on all this distress weighing down on me?” It’s a sentiment later echoed in “Eveline.”
The ballad winds into “Even Jesus Bought the Blues,” telling a lady’s story of habit on the “darkish facet of the street” as she prays, “Make me an angel lord, discover me a means.” Whereas the track, which narrates the nation’s opioid epidemic, might lean into the tragic, Lee is cautious to painting her story with hope and sweetness, setting it in opposition to a sanguine velocity that feels cathartic.
“Drink the River,” the album’s lead single and maybe most compelling monitor, positions itself as a solution to its predecessor, providing love within the face of misfortune. For the refrain, Lee confesses, “I can’t drink the river to dry the land/Bury the ocean beneath the sand,” earlier than vowing, “However I can love you till the tide pulls me underneath by and by.”
It’s a divergence that the Nashville native cements in “Coronary heart Don’t Break,” the place he presses, “Don’t you realize? Below all of it, there’s a effective line between the darkness and the daybreak.”
Lee dips again into the attractive and the somber with “Merigold,” tracing the story of a person in Mississippi shedding somebody to most cancers, who pleads, “Lord, please decide up the telephone, I need you to know, you’ll be able to take me when she goes” and when he delivers the road, you’ll be able to really feel him aching to comply with her into the delta.
The report bids goodbye with tongue-in-cheek “Property Line,” a track that paints a panorama of “100 acres outdoors of Birmingham” and a person’s relentless, cussed safety of his land and values. Like in “All I Can Do Is Write About It” earlier within the album, Lee as soon as once more concurrently takes on Americana whereas additionally paying homage to it.
When requested who he writes these songs for, Lee says, “I’m doing it for the child model of me who wished to be observed that I used to be completely different, however was attempting so laborious to assimilate into the tradition that I grew up round. But in addition, I didn’t need to lose my roots, my origin. I’m so happy with being in Tennessee and being in Nashville, and I’m equally possibly much more happy with my dad and mom being immigrants from Taiwan. So, if I’m doing it for something, it’s positively, the spirit of that… bridging these gaps.”
As Drink the River sways from the “fantastic thing about the hills of Carolina to the sweetness of the grass in Tennessee,” every line Lee pens affords a roadmap of the American story, one which stretches, spins, and continues to unfold someplace between the darkness and the daybreak.
