TROY CASSAR-DALY – I LOVE THIS PLACE
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Troy Cassar-Daly play at a small country and folk festival called the Foggy Mountain Jam – and I can’t help but hear this album through that event. A field in the middle of a valley, children running around, the audience – not more than 400 people – reclined in folding chairs, drinking, sitting well back from the stage. Troy his partner Laurel Edwards took the stage and performed a set of duets, very funny, very touching. “Country music,” Troy said at one point, “country music is people.” He’s right of course. Country is popular music, the music of communities. Love This Place is an album after this principle – first single Big, Big Love is a commercial-sounding country song, the American model – a driving rock and roll back-beat, banjo playing a simple, repetitive riff – and it’s a song about love, about the things that keep people together. But Troy basically spans the whole spectrum of country here – hootenanny jams, soft-spoken ballads like the title track and Down That Road Before, a song which plays like a long-lost country standard – and there are pop songs, like Country Boy (Lost in the City), which, well, I kind of wish was tongue-in-cheek, but isn’t. Troy Cassar-Daley makes country music for the people, but he makes it from the middle of the (country) road.
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