Review: Borrowed Time

Reviewed by Jerome Clark for Rambles.Net
09.04.2021

I suppose you could call Joe Troop a Pete Seeger for the 21st century. A radical-activist folk singer who claims banjo as his principal instrument, he writes topical (and other) songs on templates of American and international traditional music. Even Troop's website mentions Seeger as a prominent, or maybe simply an obvious, inspiration.

Still, Seeger's approach was rooted in a long-gone era of the Popular Front, progressivism and leftwing unions associated with the CIO (before it merged with its rival, more conservative AFL). Now preserved in a mass of reissues, the folk-derived songs from those days, however well meaning, sometimes feel clunky and didactic, evoking "the people" with all the fidelity to lived experience that the dopey fiction of Stalinist socialist realism has to offer. The clear-eyed view tells this much: that while Seeger was responsible for some of the most powerful protest songs ever penned, he also dumped a whole lot of forgettable drivel on the world.

Broadly speaking, Troop's songs are intended for a longer, sturdier hold on thought and imagination. In common with Seeger, Troop draws from an assortment of styles but with perhaps a deeper command of them. It doesn't hurt that the musical guests include such worthy figures in the current scene as Abigail Washburn, Tim O'Brien and Bela Fleck. Also, that there are some pretty funny songs, too. "Red, White & Blues" is a comic marvel.

It's something of a shock to hear what Troop does with an approach to topical songwriting that owes practically nothing to Dylan's 1960s revisionist assault on the genre. I guess it shows that you can be sincere without coming across as cloyingly earnest or irritatingly self-righteous. Trafficking in the familiar but in a novel vocabulary, Borrowed Time underscores the eternal newness, always there waiting to be retrieved, of old folk music.

Though this is Troop's first solo album, it doesn't arrive out of nowhere. His previous project was Che Apalache, a modernist sort-of bluegrass band that garnered a lot of attention and won some awards. For reasons unclear to me in retrospect, I didn't connect with the recording, issued in 2019. Toward the top of my to-do list, I plan to return to the disc and assess where we failed to communicate.

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