The inimitable Phil Lee is not one of your grandparents’ Nashville stars. No, he’s one of those barely-discovered left-side-of-Nashville writers who probably doesn’t even know where Music Row is. Lee will perform in concert Saturday, June 20, at 7:30 pm at Prairie Blue Creative Arts on the west side of the courthouse square in Jefferson. Admission is by donation.
Lee is touring with his new CD, Some Gotta Lose (Palookaville), produced by Richard Bennett of Dire Straits. The late Waylon Jennings said about Lee, “That guy needs to switch to decaf.” Lee recorded the new CD, filled with mainly original songs, in upstate New York and mastered the recording in Nashville.
“A lot of thinking did not go into this record,” Lee quipped, adding with more seriousness that when the CD was sent to Nashville to be mastered and mixed, the engineers said, “Nothing needs to be fixed.”
Lee said, “Mainly I got the idea from never having a snappy comeback to the query, ’You’re so dang fabulous, how come I’ve never heard of you?’ My pat answer became, ‘Hey, some gotta lose.’”
Regardless of his self-deprecating humor, Some Gotta Lose is filled with original ballads and folk rock songs plus “If Frogs Had Wings,” where he channels Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt, also a tango to the Cajun-classic “Lil’ Liza Jane.”
Associated Press described Lee as “combining the social consciousness of Woody Guthrie with the twisted fury of Jerry Lee Lewis.”
“I didn’t write ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ but I could have if I’d gotten here in time,” Lee said.
Some Gotta Lose is Lee’s 5th solo studio CD. This roots rocker is a native of Durham, NC, whose music is “irreverent, ragged and beautiful in its simplicity” and who crafts songs that are home to a cast of social misfits, outcasts and people living on the fringe. Truly, as a former long-distance trucker, Lee has lived much of the colorful life about which he writes in his songs. Briefly, he was a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers.
To learn more about Phil Lee, visit his website at http://philleeone.com/
