What distinguishes
Steve Young's classic
Seven Bridges Road -- a follow-up to the well-received A&M album
Rock Salt and Nails -- is the appearance of
Young's signature tunes: the title track; "Lonesome, On'ry & Mean," which was a smash for
Waylon Jennings as an outlaw anthem and established
Young as a songwriter for many other country stars; and the melodic jeremiad "Montgomery in the Rain."
Seven Bridges Road is also the most purely "country" record
Young ever issued. There is no rock & roll on this set, and there aren't any folk songs either. It's pretty much a honky tonk record in the
Merle Haggard vein, with a voice equally influenced by the West Coast folk-rock sound. Nashville's session cats -- including
Pete Drake on pedal steel, fiddle ace
Buddy Spicher, harmonica player
Charlie McCoy,
Elvis sideman
D.J. Fontana, producer and pianist David Briggs, and more than a dozen others -- contributed to the album. All but three tracks were written or co-written by
Young; of the covers, his read of
Haggard's "I Can't Hold Myself in Line" is a stunner. On the humorous side, "The White Trash Song" -- performed with the Last Mile Ramblers -- is a stomping electric bluegrass number that hints at the more rockist direction
Young would be heading in on future recordings. But it is on the three bona fide classics that we encounter a fully developed
Young, not only as a songwriter, but as a singer. In particular, "Seven Bridges Road" and "Montgomery in the Rain" offer a writer who has taken everyone from Thomas Wolfe to
Hank Williams and turned them into something completely his own: prosaic, profound, and scathingly original. This is a bona fide masterpiece. [A Chinese version was also released.] ~ Thom Jurek