Ryan Bingham - Fear and Saturday Night

Ryan Bingham learned to play country music during years of hard work in small time gigs and the rodeo circuit, while moving throughout the southwestern United States.  He likes to write music in the solitude of natural beauty without the distractions of technology, and therefore his music has a Bob Dylan or Neil Young singer-songwriter feel to it.  This is how Fear and Saturday Night came into being.

Fear and Saturday Night is the second Ryan Bingham album since he dissolved the Dead Horses and created his own record label, Axster Bingham Records, named after himself and his wife Anna Axter.  It was written during a dark time in Bingham’s life:  he had recently lost his mother to alcoholism and his father to suicide.  Despite this, the album is filled with optimism and laced with hope.  While his previous two releases, 2012’s Tomorrowland and 2010’s Junky Star, are dark, depressing, and melancholy, Fear and Saturday Night is a lot more upbeat and varied in style while still retaining some of the good old-fashioned country sadness that made Ryan Bingham famous.  The album opens with “Nobody Knows My Trouble,” which is classic, depressed, acoustic Ryan Bingham.  It continues with “Broken Heart Tattoos,” which is a song about what he wants for his future children, as he looks back on his own painful childhood.  “Top Shelf Drug” is a vintage, Black Keys style, alternative blues rock with delicious electric piano in the background, which features the timeless metaphor of love being compared to an addiction.  Perhaps the most hopeful song on the album, “Island in the Sky” contains a simple, yet powerful and uplifting harmonica riff.  With “Adventures of You and Me,” Bingham returns to the mariachi music of Laredo, Texas where he first learned to play the guitar. “Radio,” the first single taken from the album, features a classic country sounding riff with a lot of piano dancing around it.  The song shifts in mood a few times, with an increase in tempo, followed by a beautiful crescendo, before returning to the original theme with the last haunting guitar notes dangling in the listener’s eardrums.  Overall, the album lacks the speed of some of his faster compositions such as “Beg for Broken Legs” and “Tell My Mother I Miss Her So,” but lacks none of the energy and makes up for the tempo with sheer technical ability and songwriting genius.

Fear and Saturday Night is aptly titled.  It combines the fear and uncertainty of a lot of Bingham’s earlier compositions with the rollicking good time and honkey-tonk piano of a good old-fashioned, southern-fried Texas Saturday night.  When listening to this album, the listener will experience many emotions across the spectrum at once, and he or she will eventually have to drop everything and just sit and listen.  You will laugh, cry, dance around, and throw up your hands in amazement.  Ryan Bingham is Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams all combined into one.  He is an outlaw, a troubadour, and a cowboy at the same time.  In fact, listening to Bingham’s acoustic folk songs, one can’t help thinking that he is Bob Dylan with a better voice and better production.  Fear and Saturday Night is Bingham’s best and most versatile album yet.  It surpasses even the magisterial country genius of “Southside of Heaven” from 2007’s Mescalito.  This is country music in all of its glory and country has never sounded so good.