The Twangtown Paramours (MaryBeth Zamer and Mike T. Lewis): Something is always at stake, something is always revealed.
By David McGee
Formation of rain clouds in nature
THE WIND WILL CHANGE AGAIN
The Twangtown Paramours
Inside Edge Records
In emerging from a period of great personal loss—of both family and friends—Twangtown Paramours Mike T. Lewis and MaryBeth Zamer found solace in songwriting. In returning with a new album, a “contemporary folk album” in their own words and their first since 2022’s Deep Roots Album of the Year Double Down on a Bad Thing, the couple is taking a rootsier approach, allowing us to hear them as we’ve not heard them before, in all-acoustic majesty, thoughtful as ever but ever more introspective, and poetic, in their feel for the human condition. They get some help from the all-star likes of Jim Van Cleve, Rick Lonow, Ed Alstrom, Rave Tesar, and Jeff Taylor; and there are a couple of co-writes with Paul Craft and Fred Koller, along with a beautiful, fingerpicked take on Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s Flatlanders classic, “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown,” made all the more haunting by Ms. Zamer’s sensitive, measured reading and tender Lewis-Zamer harmonizing. And lest anyone think “all-acoustic” augurs a sedate outing, well, dig the romping title tune closing the album on an optimistic, celebratory note, thanks to Ms. Zamer’s rousing vocal buttressed by a feisty guitar solo and pounding piano out of the Jerry Lee school of barnburning.
‘Stars Without a Heaven,’ The Twangtown Paramours, from The Wind Will Change Again
‘The Goodwill Store,’ The Twangtown Paramours, from The Wind Will Change
As cohesive as the trio of Paramours albums preceding it, The Wind Will Change Again might well be considered a song cycle reflecting on love, loss, loneliness and bracing spiritual resilience of a life affirming sort. Witness the uplifting title tune as the album closer, placed as if it’s both the finale of this album and the starting point for the next one. Witness “Stars Without a Heaven” an exquisite, heart tugging balladic tribute based on the true story of a young girl hidden from the Nazis by her mother, whose kiss and touch to her daughter’s cheek marked their final lasting moment together. Ms. Zamer is so fully invested emotionally in the story as to make it seem her own and bring both characters to vivid life. The precious, holy memories she describes are framed by a fiddle’s long, lean, moaning lines augmenting existential entreaties of Dickensian tenderness evoked by the mother’s passing: “…do stars without a heaven still shine/do they sparkle and shimmer in some other sky/do they light up the darkness burning so bright/do stars without a heaven still shine…” Witness, in a spirited album opening kiss-off, the jubilant fiddle-fired strut of the newly liberated distaff narrator of “Sincerely Yours No More” (“Now you find this letter by the door…signed Sincerely Yours No More…”) to the tender, piano-based ballad extolling the unwavering love and support of “Old Friends” who “know how to reach you when you hide away.” Ms. Zamer, now a retired Federal prosecutor, reaches an apex of interpretive vocalizing here, so fully inhabiting the characters she portrays as to make them real. Multi-instrumentalist Lewis also shines with a sensitive lead vocal on “Part of Me,” a bit of pointed self-assessment in which “the part of me that’s you” serves as shelter from the storm and offers a humorous interlude in the skewed Steve Goodman-like humor attending thrift store shopping in “The Goodwill Store” (“if it comes from your heart and your dresser drawer…”).
‘The Wind Will Change Again,’ The Twangtown Paramours, from The Wind Will Change Again
Witness herein the human heart in all its complexity. Something is always at stake; something is always revealed. Right on time for a most chaotic time in our collective history, The Wind Will Change Again is more than this young year’s first important album. It’s built to last. And so it will.
