Music Review: David Jameson, ‘Tall Dark Pines’
On his new album, a world-traveled singer-songwriter finds home in classic country, traditional folk and romanticized Old West outlaw imagery.
David Jameson’s Tall Dark Pines album artwork, 2022.
In my early childhood, my dad filled my imagination with Hank Sr. and Jimmie Rodgers songs, old Hollywood Westerns, and biographies of pioneers and explorers. In real life I was a soft suburban Virginia kid, but in my mind I was always slinging guns in a romanticized Old West and hopping trains all through the South.
I’ve been drawn to David Jameson's music since I discovered it, and when I heard these lyrics in a song about his grandfather, I realized we had similar formative experiences: “We sang gunfighter ballads / As I bounced on your thigh,” he sings. It explains a lot about his new record, which came out Jan. 27, and about why I love it so much. Although Jameson’s been all over the world—even appearing on a Chinese equivalent of The Voice, singing country songs in Mandarin—for this album he’s come home to his love of classic country music that his grandfather instilled in him as a boy.
Tall Dark Pines explores many different themes and tells a wide variety of stories—from murderous revenge to familial love—but nearly every song is saturated with gunslinging imagery (and an outlaw country sound to match it) that fires up the part of my brain that holds on to my childhood memories, dreaming of danger and excitement. Although the storytelling is vivid enough to be taken literally, those Old West images and often violent stories in many cases become metaphors—for being betrayed in love, feeling trapped in corporate life, losing control of your life, and more.
David Jameson. Photo credit: Melissa Stillwell.
The first track on the album, “25 to Life,” is a stellar example. Jameson’s rich voice and evocative delivery is accompanied by haunting, moody instrumentation, including a spine-tingling slow walkdown that recurs throughout, as he uses outlaw imagery to capture the despair of being stuck in an unfulfilling job (I love the double meaning in “I punch out in fits of rage”) and the tantalizing prospect of giving it all up to follow your true passion:
I pull this mask up on my face
I’m back in my happy place
Riding again with the old gang
Stealing hearts and taking names
The next track, “Sherman’s March,” opens on a tense scene straight out of a classic Western:
Staring down the barrel of a law man’s 45
He says, “Boy, better keep your hands high, if you want to stay alive”
“Officer, it’s not how it seems, not how it seems at all”
Says “Boy, I know just who you are, you’ve been running from the law”
Ice cold steel around my wrists, but it’s not my time to fall
The lyrics take an unexpected turn from there as the crime is revealed to be one of love: “But darling I never stole your heart, you gave it from the start.” The trail of destruction the narrator creates when their relationship ends could be metaphorical or literal or somewhere in between: “So I took off like Sherman’s March, burning towns lay in my wake … Ashes laying all around, there’s nothing you could say.”
Unlike those first two songs, which use gunfighter imagery so iconic it’s almost a universal language, the title track “Tall Dark Pines” tells a specific story, based on real events, of a man being released from prison and taking revenge on his ex and her new man. This dark-as-they-come murder ballad was the first song I heard from Jameson nearly a year ago, and it’s got everything: a plot line that, despite being based on fairly recent events, could be from a classic English or Scottish folk song, and a rolling, lilting melody and cadence that also hearken to those tropes. It also ties to 1800s American music with a brief interlude sampling “In the Pines”/”Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Jameson’s ominous, mournful treatment of the lines is his own, completely different from either Bill Monroe’s or Lead Belly’s.
David Jameson. Photo credit: Myriam Nicodemus.
Another murder ballad follows, a fictional one this time. Like “Tall Dark Pines,” the narrator of “East of Eden” takes revenge on the man who slept with his lover—only this time it’s his brother (hence the song title and references to Cain and Abel). Unlike “Tall Dark Pines,” however, where the murderer seems cold and relatively clear-headed, the “Cain” character acts in the heat of the moment and runs chaotically, tormented (if not remorseful) by what he’s done:
I’m running East of Eden
People, they pass me by
Hop a train to the next station
Pop a pill to kill the time
From dust to dust they tell us
But not for this old soul
For I am doomed to wander
No respite from the road
Even the most outlaw of country stars, Johnny Cash, sometimes opted for more wholesome topics, and Jameson includes two unabashedly sentimental songs about family on a thematic par with “Daddy Sang Bass.” The first, “Family Bible,” was co-written with his father and shares moments from the life of his grandmother, a tireless hero who worked nights, kept house and raised seven children after her husband died. The circle remains unbroken as father and son reminisce: “It’s the song of me and you / And you’ll keep singing when I go too.”
Another classic country theme shapes the next track, “Gone Like the Wind.” Like in Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” and Jason Isbell’s “Last of My Kind,” a country boy longs to leave the big city. In Jameson’s song, he’s also planning to leave a relationship that’s proven as hollow as city life:
Day after day, I was putting cash away
But darling I can’t afford your soul
Your heart is hard like these northern winters
Lately, I’m chilled to the bone
Jameson takes on yet another timeless trope of the genre—truck-driving songs—with “Ballin’ the Jack.” The frenetic pace calls to mind “Eastbound and Down” and matches the out-of-control journey this particular driver is on. The white-knuckled chaos is described in over-the-top funny wordplay: “My face is white as a cotton sheet / My heart is out flapping there in the breeze / This engine is moaning just like a young boy’s dream.” As with many of Jameson’s songs, the lyrics could be taken literally or as an extended metaphor for a life that’s gone off the rails in some other way: “I call out God, are you on the CB / Can you send me some counsel please / Oh give me a preacher to read my last rights to me.”
David Jameson. Photo credit: Myriam Nicodemus.
On his other sentimental song of the album, Jameson reminisces about the man who first imbued him with his love of West-themed story songs—his grandfather—and honors that bond by using gunfighter imagery to describe an upstanding life. “Eye for an Eye” is a Biblical phrase about criminal justice, but here it’s used to frame up the spiritual justice of a new family member being born the same night his grandfather passes away.
The album ends with another ever-popular theme carried over from centuries-old English and Scottish folk songs—the lament of a condemned man on the eve of his execution. “One Last Lullaby” opens with a twist on a ubiquitous child’s bedtime prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I don’t die before I wake
The hangman my life will take
Although he prays, and regrets the toll his decisions and impending death will take on his mother, this prisoner’s as unrepentant as the narrator in Colter Wall’s “Ballad of a Law Abiding Sophisticate”: “I have sinned but I won't repent / That warm 44 felt good in my hands.”
Tall Dark Pines pays homage to many country and folk music songs and traditions, both old and more recent, but it never sounds derivative. Jameson’s unique voice, and the way he rides the line between literal and metaphorical, give it an indelible stamp all its own. You can learn more about this fascinating artist at his website and by following @davidjamesonh on Instagram.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
