John Kilzer Back With Hide Away

John Kilzer returns to form with eclectic, compelling HIDE AWAY

Album out October 14 on Archer Records

A few streams converged to set John Kilzer on the road to Hide Away (Archer Records), a remarkable return to form for a songwriter steeped in Memphis’s rich history of blues, soul, gospel, and folk music.

The deep-groove “Till We’re All Free” grew from a dinner conversation with friend and sax player Kirk Whalum. In the waning hours before the funeral of longtime friend and Memphis folk-blues legend Sid Selvidge, Kilzer found the song “Love Wants To Give Its Heart To You” arriving more or less in a single pass. And in a weekend at Hot Springs’ venerable Arlington Hotel, looking out over the water, he felt the first few songs start to come. When they did, John Kilzer’s soul was ready to receive the music.

And it’s that soul work, that music work, that hits you from the opening moments of Hide Away. This is a Memphis record from kickoff to fadeout, its dozen tracks moving handily from electric blues to congregational-style call-and-response choruses to folk-rock ballads. It’s an eclectic assembly of styles and performances, one a lot of younger artists might not attempt. But Kilzer’s firmly in the pocket all the way through, the gentle timbre of his fine-grain-sandpaper voice able to ride both the gentle piano lines of “California” and the muddy stomp of “Graveyard Jones,” and carry them off with an audible tone of deep joy and dues paid.

That’s a voice you don’t acquire without a long-game track record. And fittingly, the roster of musicians on Hide Away reads like a choice blend of Memphis’s old guard and young turks. Sid Selvidge’s son Steve, currently of The Hold Steady, contributes guitar and backing vocals. Luther Dickinson, son of legendary producer Jim Dickinson, currently of The North Mississippi All-Stars, plays guitar and lap steel. Contemporary folk/blues powerhouse Alvin Youngblood Hart shows up for guitar and vocals, and keeping the beat is renowned drummer Greg Morrow. Kirk Whalum is on hand to help serve up “Till We’re All Free,” Kevin Houston (North Mississippi Allstars) co-produces, and a host of equally heavy hitters deepen an already formidable bench.

Recorded at Memphis’s Music+Arts Studio, mostly over three days and mostly live, Hide Away found polished songwriter Kilzer stepping up his game even before the tape began rolling.

“You get these kinds of A-Team players in a room, you have to be ready,” he says. “There’s got to be a frisson in a song, some feeling that’s got to be like, okay, is it falling? Is it gonna fly? And we ended up with a kind of transcendental momentum. It was like a conversation going on there in the room. Ironically, all the preparation allowed the music to have an element of chance in it.”

Spin Hide Away and one place you’ll find that element of chance is in its diversity of styles. The prayerful “Love Wants To Give Its Heart To You,” the sinister slide guitar of “Crescent Moon,” the fuzzed-out, organ-inflected pop of “Love Is War,” the ragged down-and-out scenery of “Sleeping In The Rain” – all driven by Kilzer’s careful storytelling and dead-accurate character voices. This is a guy who’s been on the skids and hasn’t forgotten the taut-string feeling of everything starting to come apart… and how sometimes, unexpectedly, the tension can ease just before the snap.

Like a lot of Southern writers, Kilzer’s got a keen sense of how the best can be salvaged out of the worst parts of us, how something bigger can reach down and turn our weaknesses to strengths. Hide Away is a record tuned into that seeming paradox. It’s a record that tells the story of how grace, as Flannery O’Connor once noted, is always within our reach even as we resist it, because we’re scared of the pain it brings. But it’s also a record that describes how that painful grace can transform us, get us through the hard stuff. That’s the story of soul, of gospel, even of the blues. It’s John Kilzer’s story. It’s all our stories, when you get down to the meat of it.

Hide Away is out October 14 on Archer Records.