CULT RECORD OF THE DAY(23-12-2009).FREEDY JOHNSTON:"CAN YOU FLY"

Freedy Johnston writes songs about roughnecks,loose dreams,and unforgivable heartbreak.Like characters in a film noir,his protagonists tend to discover themselves cast off from ordinary life by unavoidable traumas or the contagions of desire.The father in "Responsible" watches his daughter run away to New York City and wonders if the example set by his fleeing for a moment to the same place on her first birthday had something to do whith it-almost whishing it did;his life has been so sterile since.No visible line separates his own ambitions and those of the people he sings about."Can you fly" is by far the best of Johnston's albums.It begins,"Well i sold the dirt to feed the band," based on the singer's own experience pawning his family farm to raise studio money,and continues along for a dozen more beautiful melodies and scrappy rockers.The sounds Johnston's music immerses itself with have been used so frequently,in the name of such mediocrity,by the hundreds of semi-articulate bands who emerged in the college-radio era,that the most difficult thing about listening to "Can you fly" may be finding the conviction to believe in its greatness.

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