Boz Scaggs
Show Time: 4:00 AM
Doors Open At: 3:00 AM
Finally, Lucinda Williams closes out the album with Scaggs on “Whispering Pines.” The two perform the song as a kind of prayer for deliverance, each of their voices yearning for a redemption that alternately seems barely within reach or drifting just out of reach. “The Band’s original version of ‘Whispering Pines’ has an exotic quality to it that I’m not sure anybody else who’s done it has quite tapped into,” Scaggs says. “The melody is strange, and there are some chord changes that are quite unexpected. But I heard a live version of it that Lucinda did that was very touching. She seemed extremely vulnerable in the way she approached it, and that vulnerability made for an amazing reading of the song. I couldn’t resist asking her to join me, and she was way into it. It was very special to me to be able to do that song with her.”
What ultimately communicates about A Fool to Care is how fully Boz Scaggs inhabits these songs. They seem less like interpretations than realizations, proofs that when you truly make someone else’s song your own, you paradoxically restore something essential to it. Scaggs believes that this album and Memphis, its immediate predecessor, might turn out to be the first two parts of a trilogy, a three-album collaboration with producer Steve Jordan and the band of extraordinarily empathetic musicians they love to work with. Let’s hope so, but let’s also not get ahead of ourselves. A Fool to Care is here right now, and to overlook its many great pleasures by thinking about more that might come in the future would be foolish and uncaring indeed. – Anthony DeCurtis
