Perhaps because Buddy Miller played guitar on the tour around Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’, now, Grammy winning “Raising Sand,” it’s easy to hear Buddy and his wife Julie on “Gasoline and Matches” as a send up of that fine T Bone Burnett triumph.  Of course, with Buddy behind the board here, it’s thicker, less hollow than what Burnett brought to “Sand.”  Still, if this fine new album doesn’t break the Millers into the big time in their own right, I hope Krauss and Plant give it consideration for “Sand II.” 

 

And, Plant does join Buddy and the Sand band here, on a dressing room recording of the Mel Tillis classic, “What You Gonna Do Leroy,” a gritty song about loving the wrong kind of woman, for all the wrong reasons, and paying the price.  It’s bittersweet, funny and mean.  Who doesn’t love a rollicking country riff about being wronged? 

 

Patty Griffin joins in on harmony for two songs, Regina McCrary sings on two as well (with Ann McC too on one), and of course, Emmylou Harris is there to remind us where Buddy has been all these years when he wasn’t working on his or Julie’s music.  But the reality, beyond Buddy’s smart, efficient production and bright guitar playing and singing on his version of the Great Americana Songbook –this time, Dee Ervin’s “One Part, Two Part,” and Leon Payne’s “The Selfishness of Man.” 

 

While the lively, fun country rock songs give “Written In Chalk” some of it’s most rewarding moments—like the old school “back to basics” ode of opener “Ellis County,” and the gritty grind of “Memphis Jane”, both written by Julie—the heart and soul of “Written in Chalk” are Julie’s ballads of heartbreak and loss.  Tracks like “Don’t Say Goodbye,” “Long Time,” “Chalk,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and “June,” that last one a heartfelt response to the death of June Carter Cash, are dripping with humanity’s most profound and consistent emotions—the bittersweet knowledge that love of life and life’s loves are not made to last on this side of the mortal coil.  But, as Julie sings of June:  “I know someday I will see you again, but the love you gave me will last until then…  Did the Lord call your name and did you take his hand, to join that family band once again.” 

 

And that’s pretty much the way that the Miller’s allow their spirituality to surface here on “Chalk.”  Long inclined toward gospel song renderings, like their take on Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side” from Buddy’s “Universal United House of Prayer,” the tend to outline the human predicament before suggesting how God responds to our hurt and disappointment.  In “Don’t Say Goodbye,” Julie writes how “There’s a bottle where God keeps all our tears saved up inside,” and in “Chalk,” she suggests that “We don’t know all the trouble we’re in, We don’t know how to get home again, Jesus come and save us from our sin.” 

 

Buddy & Julie aren’t breaking new ground, but when you have such rich, honest connections, and such fresh means of expression in such fully realized songs, they continue to make the kind of record that will stay in my car stereo far more longer that the so-called “next big thing.”