John Hiatt

John Hiatt playlist

Contributor: Andrew Shields

In the close to forty years since the release of his first album, Hanging Around The Observatory, in 1974, John Hiatt has built up a remarkably consistent body of work which establishes him, in my opinion, as one of the best American songwriters of his generation. From an early point in his career, Hiatt was widely seen as a songwriters’ songwriter, with his songs being covered by a wide range of other artists. These included Three Dog Night, who recorded Hiatt’s Sure As I Am Sitting Here as early as 1974, country artists like Roseanne Cash (who had an early hit with the excellent The Way We Make A Broken Heart) and Bob Dylan, who performed his song, The Usual, in the abysmal 1987 movie, Hearts Of Fire.

While Hiatt’s early albums contained some excellent songs (including Riding With The King, one of the best tribute songs to Elvis Presley, which I have included here and which was later covered by B.B. King and Eric Clapton), they tended to be somewhat patchy affairs. It was not, perhaps, until his classic album Bring The Family was released in 1987 that Hiatt fully realised the potential which he had shown in his early work. On it, Hiatt achieved a potent fusion of his early influences,which included folk, country, gospel and soul music, with an added tinge of ‘New Wave’ edginess. This edginess reflected the influence on his work of contemporary English songwriters like Elvis Costello (who covered Hiatt’s song, She Loves The Jerk and who duetted with him on the song Living A Little, Laughing A Little on Warming Up To The Ice Age) and Graham Parker.

The themes which Hiatt covered on Bring The Family were ones which he was to explore further in his later work: such themes included the difficulties and rewards of family life, the after-effects of his own seemingly difficult upbringing and the painful processes by which maturity is achieved. The songs were also delivered with a hard-won wisdom, which seemed to owe a good deal to some of the difficulties which Hiatt had experienced in his own personal life up to that point.

Another of the great strengths of Bring The Family was the uniform excellence of the musicians who backed Hiatt on it; Ry Cooder, whose guitar playing was exemplary throughout (Hiatt had previously been a member of Cooder’s band and had co-written the excellent Across The Borderline with him and Jim Dickinson), Nick Lowe who played bass and the great Jim Keltner who played drums. The songs on the album were also consistently excellent and it was very difficult to decide which ones to exclude from this list. In the end, however, my choice was based on selecting those tracks which gave a good representation of the qualities of the album as a whole. The ones that missed out by a whisker were excellent songs such as Have A Little Faith In Me, Thank You Girl and Thing Called Love, (which Bonnie Raitt was to cover to very good effect on her excellent 1987 album, Nick Of Time).

Slow Turning, the album which Hiatt released after Bring The Family, was not, perhaps, quite as good as its predecessor, but it was still a very fine album in its own right. Again, he surrounded himself with a collection of fine musicians, including the excellent slide guitarist, Sonny Landreth, and the fine mandolinist, Bernie Leadon, best known, of course, for his involvement with The Eagles. My two selections from it here are the superb country ballad, Icy Blue Heart, and the title song, which continues along the autobiographical vein so effectively begun on Bring The Family. The album also featured what was, perhaps, Hiatt’s most effective ‘soul’ song, the excellent Feels Like Rain, which I would have liked to include here. Among a number of other fine songs on Slow Turning like Drive South and Sometime Other Than Now, there was also the catchy Georgia Rae, which Hiatt wrote to celebrate the birth of his second daughter just before the album was recorded.

Like Slow Turning, Hiatt’s next album, Stolen Moments, further explored a number of the themes which Hiatt had first touched on in Bring The Family. While it is somewhat disappointing by the standards of the previous two, it did include some fine songs. The best of these, Real Fine Love, which is selected here, is one Hiatt’s finest autobiographical songs. Taken together, these three albums form a coherent whole and they trace Hiatt’s recovery from what had been a very difficult period in his personal life towards a new-found contentment in both his family life and professional career.

Since then, John Hiatt has made a series of remarkably consistent albums and I have included some of the best songs from them here. My personal favourite of his later albums, however, is the superb Crossing Muddy Waters, a pared back, mainly acoustic album, which shows his mastery of what would nowadays be described as American roots music. The title song is one of Hiatt’s most personal and bravest songs, dealing with the tragic death of his second wife. Now in his fifth decade in the music business, and as his most recent CD, Mystic Pinball, amply demonstrates, John Hiatt continues to write excellent songs and is well deserving of a place among the best songwriters of recent times.

John Hiatt official website

The John Hiatt Archives

John Hiatt biography (Apple Music)

Andrew Shields is a freelance historian, who grew up in the West of Ireland and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. Along with an interest in history, politics and literature, his other principal occupations are listening to and reading about the music of Bob Dylan and, in more recent years, immersing himself in the often brilliant and unduly neglected music of Phil Ochs ….

TopperPost #191