Plug It In and Play

Album Review

The U.S. census of 1890 declared that the once wide-open American frontier was officially closed; there were at least two people per square mile everywhere in the country, from coast to coast. One hundred seventeen years later, in a nation with a population over 300 million, there still remain those who mourn this fact, or, amazingly, haven't yet gotten the news. These are the people Texas singer/songwriter Steve Bedunah concerns himself with. On his first album, Hand Me Down Land, he gave his various characters many reasons for their troubles. On his second, Plug It In and Play, he often seems to be describing variations of the same single character, a sense reinforced by his tendency to set the songs in the first person, and that "I" narrator is a guy who largely makes his own problems. As self-described in the opening number, "Down to This River," the singer is a man who wants to "get away from it all," but not in the sense of going on vacation. Rather, he is a rural, 19th century type who looks with abhorrence at the modern world of credit cards and ATMs. "What's this country coming to?," he asks before raging at all those Internet types, "I want to email them all to go to hell." Contemporary life keeps coming up for ridicule in the songs in references to Wal-Mart and SUVs, but it isn't so much that Bedunah is a Luddite, it's that he sees himself as a sort of updated version of Huckleberry Finn, worried that someone, usually his woman or someone else's woman, is trying to civilize him. In the second song, "Please Have Her Call Me," he tries to explain that he comes by his rugged individualism honestly in the sense that his father was a rambling man, too, but over and over his point is the same, that he (or the character who's singing) wants to be free to drink his whiskey, shoot his guns, play his guitar, and hit the road, but is tied down to a world of responsibility that includes matrimony followed by the risks of alimony and child support. It's an old story, of course, but it is at least somewhat less forbidding than the stories Bedunah told in Hand Me Down Land, and it is told with livelier music, a country-rock sound that recalls Waylon Jennings and even, at times, Lynyrd Skynyrd, supporting the singer's rusty, heavily Texas-accented voice. And, anyway, it may all be a fantasy; in the acknowledgements, Bedunah is lavish in his praise of his wife "for your love, inspiration, patience, and for all your work on this project." (Melissa Bedunah is credited for CD layout and design.) He also thanks his four children "for making everything matter." Guess he must be singing about somebody else in these songs!