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- Thad Cockrell
Warmth & Beauty
Yep Roc YEP 2048
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Warmth
& Beauty is only the second album of North Carolina singer-songwriter
Thad Cockrell. His debut Stack of Dreams was highly praised
by my ex-Rockzillaworld colleague, the much-missed William Michael
Smith, which obviously sent me down review road with the highest
of expectations. Like its predecessor Warmth & Beauty
was more or less recorded 'live' in Chapel Hill N.C. with
veteran musician/producer Chris Stamey and Cockrell himself twiddling
the knobs in the studio.
The album has become very much a North Carolina home product.
Released on N.C. label Yep Roc, it features fellow North Carolina
musicians Caitlin Cary (ex-Whiskeytown fiddler) and Tift Merritt
as well as drummer Zeke Hutchins and pedal steel player Greg
Readling, both members of Tift's band, The Carbines.
If you call an album Warmth & Beauty, you are asking
for trouble and opening with the rather indifferent power-pop
ditty "I'd Rather Have You" isn't really helping. Fortunately,
that song sets the listener on the completely wrong foot concerning
the rest of the material. The title song "Warmth & Beauty,"
a charming, melancholic country ballad, fully lives up to its
expectations and from there the album heads into the right direction:
it stays on the (high lonesome) country road.
It takes time to get used to Cockrell's voice, a rather high
tinny tenor not unlike Ricky Skaggs', a voice that screams for
a harmony (baritone or higher tenor), and female voices, even
as good as Tift Merritt's and Caitlin Cary's, do not quite do
the trick. If you listen to "Why Go," where Cockrell
takes off like Phil Everly, you're just praying for Don's voice
to come in and, unfortunately, it never happens. However, this
doesn't make "Why Go" a bad song, in fact, it's one
of the best the Everly's have never written or recorded, and
neither does it make Warmth & Beauty a bad album.
In "Some Tears," a song Cockrell wrote about his
granddad, he comes dangerously close to Jackson Browne's best
work. He stays on the same plaintive track with "She Ain't
No You," all pedal steel, strings and acoustic guitars and
"Breaking of a Day," a wonderfully wistful and soulful
country ballad that can compete with the best in its genre. Followed
by the equally sad and poignant "My Favorite Memory,"
a gorgeous heartbreaker prominently featuring Greg Readling on
pedal steel, beauty and warmth have already built up strong enough
to conquer most of the ugly and cold things you may be surrounded
by right now.
The honky tonker "What's The Use," a fine opportunity
for multi-instrumentalist John Teer to excel on fiddle, should
be a real jukebox killer in any bar with some self-esteem and
"I Was So Lonesome" is another Jackson Browne and gospel-inspired
song with a truly triumphant role for Readling and his pedal
steel. The gospel-feel some of the songs breathe can be explained
by the fact that Cockrell is the son of a Baptist preacher, a
graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg,
Virginia and a student at the Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Wake Forest. However, these credentials shouldn't
put off the secular listeners: none of Cockrell's songs on this
album are overtly religious.
Unfortunately, the closing song "Are You Still Missing
Me?" doesn't really do it for me. It is one of these tedious
piano ballads, where you keep looking for a guy with a wig and
frivolous glasses nervously squeezing a cowboy hat between his
knees, just in case some suit from Nashville is in the neighborhood.
Still, even if Warmth & Beauty does not keep all the
promises Thad Cockrell made with Stack of Dreams, it is
an album full of emotionally potent songs written and delivered
by a young man who has his whole career in front of him. If this
year's CMA-awards rather than trying to exploit Johnny Cash's
death commercially, have indeed established a trend to return
to more traditional country music, Cockrell might even have a
chance to slip into the main stream. It would be a deserved recognition
for an artist who does not consider himself alt.country. Just
"country" would be fine for him, I'm sure.
*www.thadcockrell.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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