Mike Mattison & Trash Magic

Turn a Midnight Corner

Landslide Records

And now for something completely different.

Harvard educated in English and American literature, Mike Mattison serves on the Council of the Association of Literary Critics, Scholars, and Writers. In 2021 he co-authored Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry with Professor Ernest Suarez of Catholic University. The book inspired him to create a novella about a fictional 1930s country blues duo rediscovered and manipulated poorly during the 1970s decadent zenith of rock and roll. Mattison, since 2002 the primary songwriter and sandpapery-soulful singing voice of the Derek Trucks Band, Scrapomatic, and now Tedeschi Trucks Band, could not resist the opportunity to also write the duo’s comeback songs. His literary imagination ran wild, and the make-believe duo’s songs became the very real and arresting ones that make up Turn a Midnight Corner, Mattison’s third solo album, recorded with his new band, Trash Magic.

Mattison, along with his Scrapomatic partner Dave Yoke and Los Lobos associate Greg Spradlin on guitars, Tedeschi Trucks Band and Scrapomatic drummer Tyler “Falcon” Greenwell, and Atlanta session bassist Wesley Flowers, make one heck of an attractive racket together. They twist the margins of the blues, rockabilly, and even flat-out country without ever losing sight of the foundations. Mattison took chances writing these songs, applying abstract lyrics to ingenious, atypical melodies.

“Going Down the Alley,” with a jittery cowboy strain poking through its snappy beat, opens the album. Mattison laments a broken marriage, singing nonchalantly of having a toothache in his heart and ice cream in his veins. The striking contradictions in the vibe of it somehow call to mind early Talking Heads. In the hip-shaking, dance hall rock ‘n roll of “Get it Back,” Mattison and the band get riled up on a Little Richard groove with a Los Lobos-like spike in its drive. “And I’m Gone” then boogies with southern backwater imagery and R&B energy. Pulling back to a tipsy pace, they complete the first third of this incredible song cycle by presenting a bemoaning, tail dragging blues. “When I was Loaded” is an eye-opener of waste relayed through just a few succinct lines.

That high level of artful variety and experience never lets up until the album shuts down.

For “Traveler,” they tie the past to the present, wrapping the aspects of a grifter we could all easily fall prey to in sauntering old-timey music. Also drawing on the past, “Be Like a Train” barrels full throttle on rockabilly. Mattison sings heartily of train hopping as Yoke and Spradlin intertwine their guitars like a haybale of Duane Eddy and James Burton licks. Greenwell and Flowers’ natural musicality makes it feel as if the floorboards of a boxcar are rattling underfoot.

Apparently, it took Mattison quite some time to write these songs amid Tedeschi Trucks Band’s demanding recording and touring schedule. Hopefully, his spare time becomes more abundant, because Turn a Midnight Corner presents wide-open, delicious promise. This is an album like they used to make them. A deep, rewarding experience that lasts the perfect amount of time. The kind of album that can easily become the soundtrack to a listener’s life for a while.

Tom Clarke for MAS

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