Midnight at the Movies

Justin Townes Earle's sophomore album Midnight at the Movies displays an adeptness and musical sophistication of remarkable, organic breadth and is as lyrically sharp as a lover's tongue as she is walking out the door. If you didn't look at the songwriting credits, you'd swear the songs were part of our collective musical DNA, penned on the stoop of a one-pump filling station in dust bowl era Oklahoma, the smoke-filled song and dream factories of Tin Pan Alley, or at the back door of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. Justin effortlessly taps the romanticism imbued in the beaten-soled travelogues and mythos of Woody Guthrie; the lounging around a campfire at a work camp and the edgy angst of a wintry Minneapolis (yeah, just try to get that mandolin line from the cover of the 'Mats' "Can't Hardly Wait" out of your head.) Midnight at the Movies is held firm by Justin's astonishing vision and conviction, yet roams o'er the vast landscape of American music without so much as a stumble.