Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 04/12/06
Label: Four

Titled in deference to Eddie Izzard, his comic hero, Lee Hazlewood's final album - the 73-year-old is currently battling cancer - offers a fitting send-off to one of rock'n'roll's more maverick talents. This Texan-born Renaissance man has always been an oddity in the conservative environs of the Lone Star state: a pacifistic veteran of the Korean War who later re-located to Sweden; the producer who injected twang into Duane Eddy; a collaborator who fired-up Nancy Sinatra; and the maker of many wonderfully strange and idiosyncratic albums, that veer between psychedelic pop, country and someplace else entirely.

With a voice murkier than Leonard Cohen, Hazlewood wrote with a wry auteur's eye - a sense of droll hang-dog detachment in one hand, a glass of something potent in the other. His many songs - including "These Boots Are Made For Walking", "Some Velvet Morning" and "Somethin' Stupid" - have since been covered by everyone from Tindersticks to Robbie Williams and, last and definitely least, Primal Scream and Kate Moss. With Sinatra, he practically invented the persona of the grizzled old stud duetting with an innocent young nymph, last heard to such great effect on Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan's "Ballad Of The Broken Seas".

Although this album is probably not the best entry point to the great man's work (the uninitiated should pick up a copy of the "Nancy And Lee" compilation, or, for the best of his solo work, "Cowboy In Sweden") it still highlights some sharp songwriting. Hiring a bunch of old guns, including Izzard, Al Casey and Tommy Parsons, as well as relative newcomers Ann Kristin Hedmark, punk poet Bela B, and the mysteriously-named Lula, "Cake Or Death" is a curate's egg rich in rewards.

Hazlewood's no-nonsense political vision, for instance, is well represented - the anti-war polemic "Baghdad Nights" rides a liquid blues riff, while "White People Thing" turns racial gentrification on it's head in the manner of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"'s Larry David. Amid a clutch of other pure Hazlewood moments (the spoken word intro to "She's Gonna Break Some Heart Tonight", the surf twang that carries "The First Song Of The Day") the album really comes into it's own in the final hurdle with a remake of "These Boots…", apparently to the original arrangement, a revision of "Some Velvet Morning", the female lead played by his eight-year-old grand daughter Phaedra, and the finale of "T.O.M (The Old Man)".

As credits roll against a delightfully mellow backing, this finds Lee Hazlewood mulling on his past, his present and his future and whether "in this place they call forever, there'll be any songs to sing". Facing death with the same heroic attitude he approached life, it could be one of the most affecting songs of the year. To paraphrase Nancy's dad, he did it his way.

    by Adam Webb