Editor:
In Joe Stanton’s newly released CD, The Voice of the Wheel, one enjoys the life of a hard-working man and his music. I love the positivity of the lyrics, the clever rhymes and the toe-tapping tunes. “I can’t settle down, love to hear the wheels go round, heaven is a sunny day, at the end of the long highway.”
“In Every Time a Train Went By,” Joe mentions the cups on Grandpa’s table which puts me right back in my Grammo’s kitchen in Halfmoon Bay sipping from her teacups.
In the “Ballad of Scotch Rocks & Red Wine,” Scotch and Red Wine are characters “Two bodies laying naked in the middle of the world.’” We hear Joe’s infamous woodshed fingerpicking style, an intricate combo of Mississippi John Hurt and Travis picking.
The instrumentation of the CD is gorgeous - fiddle, pedal steel, tasteful guitar licks enhanced of course by Joe’s beautiful baritone voice.
Every song is satisfying from beginning to end, like a good meal.
“In Reach Out,” Joe reaches out vocally with a warm, welcoming elongated note. It is the catchy kind of chorus one keeps singing to themselves over and over.
And “Still,” well that’s a beauty.
“and then twenty years go by,
I don’t realize until,
my heart jumps to a smile when i see you
comin’ up the hill,
still
and then twenty years go by
I don’t realize until,
I look into your eyes and you can surprise
me still,
Still.”
Joe Stanton is one stellar singer-songwriter. Give yourself a treat. Buy this CD.
Don’t miss Joe’s upcoming performance with Marin Patenaude of Vancouver at the Pender Harbour School of Music Coffee House on May 9.
Catherine McNeil
