Truth Is Not Fiction

Product Details

Artist : Otis Taylor
Binding : Audio CD
EAN : 0089408358722
Label : Universal Music Group
Number of Discs : 1
Product Group : Music
Release Date : 2003-07-29
UPC : 089408358722

ASIN : B00009NH8M

Track Listings for

Disc-1
1. Rosa, Rosa
2. Kitchen Towel
3. Comb Your Brown Hair
4. Babies Don't Lie
5. Be My Frankenstein
6. House of the Crosses
7. Past Times
8. Shakie's Gone
9. Be My Witness
10. Nasty Letter
11. Walk on Water
12. Baby, Please Don't Go

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com

There is an upbeat style of blues that lightens life's darkest moments by its sheer joyfulness and exuberance. And then there is Otis Taylor's style of blues. On his fourth album, the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter drags us once again into the seething underbelly of emotional gloom, wallowing in the sadness, hurt, and confrontation of the human condition. It's not pretty, but it's the territory that has been uniquely staked out by Taylor and his stripped-down, percussion-less backing duo of producer-bassist Kenny Passarelli and lead guitarist Eddie Turner. This riveting storytelling music springs from Delta, folk, slave, and prison songs, with many tracks boiled down to a single repeated chord. Mournful cello occasionally fleshes out the sound, but with Turner's slicing lead guitar and Taylor's dusky voice singing harrowing tales of lynching, rape, murder, death, lost love, and nasty letters, the intensity generated--even by the album's only cover, "Baby Please Don't Go"--is off the scale. Not for the squeamish, Taylor's chilling music provokes, angers, and unnerves the listener in ways that are just too powerful for most artists to muster. Otis Taylor's truth is found in the dark recesses and murky shadows. Explore it with caution. --Hal Horowitz

Customer Reviews

difficult, grim, unpleasant (2004-06-16)

I guess I'm one of the shallow people who likes a little wisdom, a little commentary, or a little irony to dilute ugliness and misery. Taylor's an artist, clear-eyed and apparently sincere, but this is about as fun as a holocaust documentary. It has none of the release usually associated with blues (or honky-tonk country) and although admirable, it's anything but enjoyable. I can't think of a setting or situation which would make me want to pop this in the CD player. I'm going to put on some Nick Drake to cheer myself up.

the stuff that lasts (2003-07-21)

Today just about any tradition-based, secular African-American musician is routinely called a blues artist, as if blues were all there is to be said about black folk music. So call Otis Taylor a "bluesman" if you will, but if so, he is far from an ordinary one. He fuses old and new in a striking, even startling, manner, and with such assurance that one cannot help comparing it to Dylan's comparable achievement. Though Truth Is Not Fiction has its own, distinctive sound, it will bring to mind such masterpieces as Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. Yes, on the evidence of this disc, one can speak of Dylan and Taylor in the same sentence.

Though thoroughly contemporary, the arrangements eerily bridge the 19th and 21st Centuries in roughly the way Dylan's recent work has done. Taylor's settings are sparer, however, and his narratives more straightforward. Taylor even manages to breathe new life into the one non-original, the hoary folk-blues "Baby, Please Don't Go" (Big Joe Williams's often-recorded rewrite of the old prison lament "Another Man Done Gone"), but it's his own material that places him among the most compelling American roots performers to come along in recent memory. Dylan would have been proud to write -- for but one example -- "Shakie's Gone," but even the master would be hard-pressed to pull it off half so well.

This is music from a deep well, indeed. If you're looking for the stuff that lasts, Otis Taylor certainly has it.

Astonishing (2003-07-18)

Otis Taylor goes deep when he's writing songs. He goes places that most of us would rather not. He exposes our uncertainty, our failings, our foolish pride, the violence that lives inside all of us. For every character urging equal rights, solidarity and brotherhood, there are two others who drink too much, lust after the wrong woman and die violently. You may shudder a bit but in the end, it's my hope that you'll find Otis' work as breathtaking as I do. There's simply nothing else like it on the market today. He is in a class all by himself.

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