Jim Patton & Sherry Brokus

Jim Patton & Sherry Brokus craft hard won narratives with equal measures heart (the opening “Would’t Change A Thing”) and home (“We’re Not So Different”). Proof: "Pattonville", the album. The Austin based singer songwriters’ excellent new album out in Europe in July deftly backs gritty realism (“Hard Times”, “Goodbye Joe Williams”) with regret (“Mean Old Man”) and redemption (“I Didn’t Stay Down”). Keen listeners discover the music’s reflective nature. “Patton has crafted new songs that do more than explain himself to his listeners”, says Geoffrey Himes of the Washington Post. “These songs explain the listeners to themselves”.

Earthy narratives framing past (“On A Hilltop By Old County Road”) and present (“Happy Family”) define the journey on "Pattonville". Classic sounds provide the soundscape. “I’ve always leaned toward a Byrds or Stones like sound when working with a full band like what Neil Young did when bringing his folky songs to his band”, Patton says, “and then waiting to see what happened”.

“The characters and themes center around real life, loneliness and sadness”, Sherry says. “I believe most folks would rather have the feeling of love’s euphoria rather than a sense of hard times”.

Look no further than the opening lines of that track for a lyrical theme tying the songs together: “Old man McCartney finally died, I went to his grave unsatisfied”, Patton sings. “Grave digger wishes he was under that hill, when he comes home to a stack of unpaid bills”. The song, written with Lew Morris, dates back to 1988, but the lyrics have a much different arrangement this time around.

“It's sad that not much has changed, so that our original lyrics still hold up”, Patton says. “The only big change is that the ‘night clerk’ mentioned in the song used to be a ‘gas station attendant’.”

Brief background. Married couple Patton and Brokus originally met at a bar in Arnold, Maryland, after Sherry approached Jim during a break in his set and asked if she could sing a song with his band. Jim subsequently suggested that she sing Neil Young's “Cowgirl In The Sand”, and the two have sung together ever since.

Aside from their early musical influences, Richard & Linda Thompson, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Everly Brothers, and Emmylou Harris singing with Bob Dylan, Jim cites 20th century American literary giants, from Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner to Kerouac, Salinger and Raymond Chandler as inspirations. He also points to the friends he grew up, doctors, lawyers, waitresses, teachers, “water rats”, gravediggers and 'the guy who drove the truck that emptied the port-o-pots all over the state' as the sources of his lyrical inspiration.