Country artist’s fine return to his bluegrass roots
Clinton Gregory had a run of Top-100 country hits in the early ’90s, but both his releases and commercial success became scarce by mid-decade. He returned last year with Too Much Ain’t Enough, his first album in more than a decade, and doubles down with this return to his bluegrass roots. Gregory started out as a fiddler, playing festivals as a child and breaking into Nashville as a session musician. His return from country crooning to tightly harmonized bluegrass is a superb spin, fueled by an obvious love of these songs and sounds. The band’s five-piece line-up reanimates a repertoire that leans almost entirely on the traditional canon. Rather than trying to stretch the genre, Gregory plugs into the formula’s original energies, making room for instrumentals, multipart harmonies and his moving lead vocals. This is no small task in a genre whose tight constrictions can leave its music sounding moribund. Gregory’s journey home plugs into a musical place that was engrained rather than learned, and the result is terrifically compelling. [©2013 Hyperbolium] 