Review of Bill's CD Long Way Home

Translated from the Dutch, published in Roots Town Music:

“Austinite” Bill Passalacqua doesn’t let the grass get overgrown. Not so long ago he released his excellent CD Peace of Mind (late 2003/early 2004 – RTMF 70), and he is already ready with a new one, with the name Long Way Home. Again this work is a very eclectic CD (10 songs in only 36 minutes), whereby Bill offers different sides of his late music.

It begins with the rockabilly/country-like You’re a Freight Train, where the music of good friend Elizabeth McQueen comes and tells of the first song they ever wrote together. This number immediately sets a good pace. The following two songs, with Jeff Talmadge helping to provide the music for, are Beautiful, a quiet love-ballad, with a text that concerns the hard life with drugs (heroin), and the title-song Long Way Home—another rock song, with a Tex-Mex horn section transmitted well (as if we were in a Mexican market square.) Spillway (music by Steve Tyska) is also a quiet pop song, good and a way to dream.

Got no Money, a piece dedicated to his 1993 Ford Ranger (with more than 420,000 km) is a true tale, which also situates Bill in a country/rockabilly environment. Photograph, written for his grandmother, who perhaps with no real interest in his music was nevertheless Bill’s greatest fan. Crossroads is then a beautiful Americana-song, written with the help of Slaid Cleaves, about the house of his parents that sat along the Illinois Central Line. The CD concludes splendidly with the remaining six minutes, in a simple song entitled Chin Up.

Written for his cousin Jacob, with the Marines in Iraq, and also based on letters of Bill’s friend who had fought in Korea and Vietnam. And here Bill turns away and against all of those useless wars! With producer Bradley Kopp, Bill Passalacqua offers his 5th CD, Long Way Home, a splendid, but much too short masterwork. (LG)

trans. By Jonathon Kirk