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"Tell the
Truth"
Lee Roy Parnell has been scoring country
hits and tearing up Texas roadhouses for many years now, but
he's never had a better album to tour behind than Tell the Truth.
Partly that's because he's never written a more personal batch
of songs--nearly every composition here is charged with self-discovery.
"How can true love ever find us, if we're just someone we've
made up," he wonders over the title track's steamy sway.
On a Pentecostal house wrecker called "Brand New Feeling,"
he testifies joyously: "I found a brand-new me." His
music's reborn, too. Parnell's blues and boogie-woogie licks
have more bite here than he's ever allowed them (witness the
slide guitar on "Crossin' Over"), and the country singer
he used to work at being doesn't show up once. Granted, Parnell's
vocals are rarely distinctive. But when he's paired at the mic
with folks like Bonnie Bramlett and (on the sure-fire crowd pleaser
"South by Southwest") Delbert McClinton, it hardly
matters. --David Cantwell |
