Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 01/17/2006
Although he never garnered the public's attention like his fellow
outlaw country cohorts
Waylon Jennings and
Willie Nelson, there are those who feel that
Tompall Glaser was actually the best of the lot. A careful and intelligent songwriter, a gifted song interpreter, and possessing a whiskey-drenched voice that easily brought out the slightest nuance in anything he sang,
Glaser was in many ways the thinking man's outlaw, and although his increasingly reclusive ways reduced him to a cult figure, he truly deserves both a reappraisal and a revival.
My Notorious Youth is the first of two CDs from Germany's
Bear Family (these guys never make a bad move) that collects
Glaser's four
MGM/
Polydor albums from the 1970s, two to a disc. These projects were all recorded at
Glaser's own
Hillbilly Central studio (where, as the saying goes, the shades were always drawn and the door was always open), and as a result everything here feels like it truly belongs together.
Glaser's voice impresses, but it is his songwriting that really sets him apart, and songs like
"Mr. Lonesome" and
"Let It Be Pretty" are melancholy masterpieces that feel so real and lived in that it almost feels like eavesdropping to hear them. Taken together, these two
Bear Family releases make an excellent introduction to the wry, gloriously sad world of
Tompall Glaser.
~Steve Leggett, All Music Guide
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