I must confess at the outset that Tom Jones has always been a figure of fun in my life. This dates back to the Sixties when my mother and I watched the then unknown Tom gyrate his way through It's Not Unusual on Top of the Pops. My mother starting laughing first and then I joined in, quite unable to resist. It was as if someone had liberally sprinkled itching powder inside his tight strides. PJ Proby may have split his trousers but Tom Jones always looked as if his might disintegrate or spontaneously combust.Perhaps that was how the knicker-throwing started. I'm not laughing any more because Tom has made an album that befits his age (70) and suits his voice. Praise & Blame is a collection of cover versions, featuring lesser-known songs from way back when (plus Bob Dylan's more recent What Good Am I) and taking in spirituals, the blues and good old rock 'n' roll. Producer Ethan Johns brings a stripped-down sound to the party and Tom sings the songs with warmth and not a trace of bombast, notably on ballads such as Did Trouble Me and If I Give My Soul. That the itching powder has not entirely been expunged from his slacks is proved by the guitar-propelled Lord Help and the splendid reworking of John Lee Hooker's Burning Hell.Apparently, someone at Jones's record label has made rude noises about this album. He needs a hearing aid. Pete Clark
Drowned In Sound Meets Tom Jones
‘Who in the hell is Tom Jones?’ spat Charles Bukowski. It’s a good question. The Tom Jones he wrote about in Hollywood is a slick Vegas showman, “his shirt is open and the black hairs on his chest show. The hairs are sweating.” The Tom Jones I meet is a white-haired Welshman about to release an album of blues and gospel so out of character that the vice-president of his own record label called it a “sick joke”. So just who in the hell does Tom Jones think he is?
He was billed alongside The Beatles and The Stones, partied with Elvis and Sinatra and dueted with everyone from Janis Joplin to Ray Charles, but in the popular imagination he’s festooned with knickers, his career built on sex appeal. Now, on Praise & Blame, he’s traded sex for death. There is a lot of mortality on Praise & Blame, and a lot of God. What’s happening here, Mr Jones? He looks at me and turns his palms towards me. “Time’s getting shorter,” he says.
“Now that I’m seventy, I know I haven’t got as much time left as I did when I was thirty, or forty, or fifty, or sixty. I still want to record as much as I can, but when you don’t have that much time left you think about it more.” Age has given him a sense of urgency, I suggest. “Exactly! You think, let’s knuckle down and let’s do some stuff that I want to do.”
It turns out that what Tom Jones wants to do is cover Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker and a host of standards drawn from the deep well of the American South. “I’d heard a lot of them before, from different artists. I knew them. ‘Run On’, I knew the Elvis Presley version. We tried it in the same key as he did it in, but I sounded too much like him. I’m not going to play it if we’re not doing anything differently, so we put it in a higher key.”
One thing you realise quickly talking to Tom Jones is that he really, really loves singing. When he talks about it, a boyish passion spills out of him. He knows these songs inside out, every nuance. “I said rather than have voices for the answers, I’ll sing the whole thing. It made it different from what I’d done before, from when other people had done it. I tried to do the same thing with all the songs, really. One or two are similar, like Johnny Cash with ‘Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down’, but still we put more of a beat to it. Johnny Cash’s was a little slower.”
This mention of Johnny Cash is telling. It has been suggested that Praise & Blame is Jones’ attempt to replicate the success of Cash’s American Recordings. Was that a conscious decision? “Well, there are comparisons – because I’m seventy now, and because some of the songs are the same, and the stripped-down nature of it because of what Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond.” The difference, he says, is in their voices. “With him, he was at the end of his… well, as it turned out, the end of his life… but certainly at the end of his recording career. He had difficulty in doing that stuff, and some of it added to the feel, because he was struggling with it. But with me – I’m not struggling with it.”
Jones is proud of his extraordinary voice, and it lends itself well to this music. Gospel is in his bones. “I’ve always liked 50s rock’n’roll music, and rock’n’roll came from gospel and blues and was a marriage of all those things in the South, in the States. I like rockabilly, boogie-woogie stuff. I like gospel not only because of the lyrics but because of the feel of the songs.”
He says he didn’t record these songs earlier because record labels were in thrall to Tom Jones the Sex Bomb: “I’ve wanted to do gospel for a long time, but most record labels want you to do pop records. Any time you sign with a label, it’s ‘Well, I’d like to do…’ ‘Yeah, we will, we’ll get to that, but meanwhile give us a hit.’ Island Records, they initially wanted hymns or songs for Christmas, so I thought that maybe this is my chance to get to those gospel songs.”
Island’s enthusiasm and decision to team him with Ethan Johns, who’s produced the likes of Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams, makes it even more surprising that their vice-president David Sharpe attacked the album in an email that was leaked to the press. His complaint was precisely that Jones was singing “hymns”, not pop songs. Jones is fiercely protective of his songs, and if the leak was part of a marketing stunt then he certainly wasn’t in on it: “I read it on the plane coming over,” he says. “One of the stewards had an English paper and he said ‘There’s a spread about your album’, so I said ‘Oh, really! Let me have a look!’ I read it and I thought ‘Who the fuck is this?’ First of all I didn’t know who the guy was. I still don’t. I only deal with the people who are involved in making the record. So, first thing when I got in, I said, ‘Who is this guy? What does he do?’ Apparently he’s one of the financial guys. I said, ‘What the fuck’s he on about?’ You can’t go condemning a record. It’s terrible for people to say, ‘Well, maybe Tom has made a mistake if the record company don’t even like it.’ I mean, that’s what people are going to read – ‘cause that’s what I read! They’ve been apologising to me ever since, but they still haven’t come up with why it was done. What is the point of that? I don’t get it. As far as I’m concerned there was no plan to get a controversy. It’s negative, I think, and misleading.”
Misleading certainly, because despite the spiritual themes these are by no means hymns. Is Jones himself religious? “I’ve always been a God fearing person,” he replies. “I pray every night, before I go to sleep. I’m always aware - aware that there’s something.”
It’s a deeply introspective album, never more so than on his version of Dylan’s ‘What Good Am I?’ Is Tom Jones really a Dylan fan? “Yeah! I listen to him more now, or I have done in the last twenty years, than I did before. When I first started recording, even before that, I’ve always liked voices. I listened to a lot of ‘singers’. I wasn’t much interested in ‘Did he write the song or didn’t he?’ In those days, I just went with what it sounded like. I wasn’t so much of a fan of Dylan then because I didn’t particularly like the way he was delivering them, whether he wrote them or not. The more I’ve listened to them, the more I’ve appreciated them.”
So what drew him to ‘What Good Am I’? “I wanted songs that were meaningful, I wanted songs that said something. Even on the up-tempo songs, like ‘Strange Things Happen Every Day’, there’s things that’ll make you think. They’re important songs. So that’s why I liked that one of Bob Dylan’s. I mean, I’d like to do an album of Dylan’s stuff, he’s written some great songs. Ethan thought, ‘How are we going to treat this?’ It was his idea to sing it in a lower key than I would ordinarily. ‘Don’t sing it out,’ he said, ‘Try and hold it, even when you go up.’ When I start to sing higher, my voice opens up, but here I controlled it. It took a few takes to get to where we did, but it was his idea for the arrangement, which I thought was great. Slow it down and sing it low. Breathy.”
He’s back enthusing about singing, but I want to know why he thinks he’s been so successful interpreting songs he hasn’t written. Does he have an actor’s instinct? “That’s exactly how I approach it. The sound of my voice – there’s a certain quality to my voice that sort of defines me. That’s the first thing, the sound of it, but then I listen to the lyrics and I want to get into it. Lyrics are very important to me, no matter what the song is. I’ve always liked lyrics, and when I hear an interesting lyric – that could be ‘Sex Bomb’, if you like. If you listen to ‘Sex Bomb’, the verses are really clever. There are some really good things in there. Like ‘Delilah’ – “I felt the knife in my hand” - it paints a picture.”
Thinking about the darker subject matter of Praise & Blame, it’s worth noting that Jones has been a proponent of the ‘murder ballad’ since early in his career: “With ‘Delilah’, everybody knows the chorus, but you’re thinking about the knife and the fella killing the girl, or ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, where’s he’s in jail.”
Jones talks about his career, his hits and his life like a man who can’t quite believe his luck. He was 24 in 1964, scraping a living as frontman for Tommy Scott and the Senators, listening to Jerry Lee Lewis records and recording unsuccessful demos with Joe Meek. Then he met Gordon Mills, who became his manager. His debut single ‘Chills and Fever’ failed to chart, but when Mills wrote ‘It’s Not Unusual’ for Sandy Shaw, Jones recorded the demo and managed to persuade them both to let him release it instead. He never looked back: “The record was so big, all of a sudden, like a few months. I recorded the song at the end of ’64, then it came out at the beginning of January ’65, and it was number one on March 1st. Then it went worldwide.”
On one particularly memorable bill in 1965, Jones appeared at the NME Poll-Winners Concert alongside The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield and The Animals. What on earth could it have felt like to be a part of that scene? Did it feel like something special was going on even then? “Oh, definitely! I mean, The Beatles opened the door. Before that it was always American music. British music was cover versions of American records. Then The Beatles came along. When I was here in London at that time you felt it – that this was it. American acts were coming over and they wanted to go to Carnaby Street. It had moved from Memphis or Motown to London.”
But like he said, he’d gone worldwide: he broke America instantly: “I think I did my first Ed Sullivan show in April of ’65. I met Elvis the same year. It was unbelievable!” Surely it was overwhelming. How do you readjust to your landscape shifting so permanently? “It was just mind-boggling. It goes from wanting to prove what I could do, singing-wise. When I got onto Top of the Pops and met all the bands they were going ‘Jesus! You’ve got a great voice!’ and I was like, ‘Wow! I’m proving it! I’m doing it!’ It was buzzy. The Beatles and The Stones were at the top of their game – and then Elvis Presley! And Frank Sinatra! In the same year! Mind-boggling!”
Jones is beaming as he tells the tale, that note of incredulity still in his voice. He shows me the way he hunched up shyly when he first had his picture taken with Elvis Presley. The way Elvis posed. “It was great, and you don’t get used to it, but it becomes a part of your life, the more you do it. Then in the Seventies when I had my own TV show and I was doing duets with Jerry Lee Lewis and…”
He’s on a roll now, but he was on a roll back then too. He was safe enough for middle America to grant him his own television show, but edgy enough to demand that his guests were his rock’n’roll heroes. The guest list reads like a roll-call of Seventies celebrity: Richard Pryor, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Peter Sellers, Ray Charles, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – but the name of the show was This is Tom Jones. “It was fantastic! I was pushing for rock’n’roll acts, you know. It was made by ABC Television in the States and they wanted more ‘safe’ acts, they wanted it to be a TV hit on the ratings. Rock’n’roll, even then, in ’69 still hadn’t really been accepted.”
Hang on a minute there, Tom. You were pretty ‘safe’ yourself. That’s why they hired you! “Well, I was recording available material. Not being a songwriter I had to rely on what was coming in. ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ came from that. Burt Bacharach wanted me to do it. I was thinking ‘I want to do more rhythm and blues, soul’, but things kept popping up – it’s like I was saying with the record companies – ‘We’ll get to that…’ Meanwhile, Big Burt Bacharach wants me to do this song for this Woody Allen film! So yeah, some things I did people would think it was towards middle-of-the-road type stuff, but if anybody came to see me live in those days I was doing more soul music than anything else.”
The advantage of being ‘safe’ in the network’s eyes was that he had the power to open the door for people he loved to get on television. That included his hero, Jerry Lee Lewis. “I’d been a fan ever since ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’. Elvis had come out with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which was the first major hit, so everybody was going, ‘Wow! Elvis is a freak of nature, a white guy singing like that’, and I said, ‘Well that’s gotta be other people! He can’t be the only one, surely!’ So when ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ came out that was it. It’s a Southern thing – White people grew up with Black people, and it was all rubbing off, you know what I mean? Elvis definitely came out with a unique sound though. The sound of his voice was… phew! In terms of the show, I was getting my way – as I say, they wanted Robert Goulet and other people that you probably don’t know, mainstream America - so I’m saying, ‘I want Jerry Lee Lewis!’ and they’re going ‘Jerry Lee Lewis?’ I said, ‘If you want me to do this, you have to do that.’ I was pleased that it was happening – and the guests were thanking me! Jerry Lee thanked me for getting him back on TV!”
Jones is still pulling in the crowds. His low-key Latitude set to showcase Praise & Blame saw disappointed fans being turned away, recalling memories of the rush to his set at Glastonbury last year: “When I went on and I was singing, I could see these kids coming in, ‘cause they weren’t all around the stage at that point, but I could see them coming over and running and I thought ‘Jesus Christ! This is great!’ I loved it!”
Bukowski called him a “cardboard man”. Bukowski was wrong on that count. He may have played ‘safe’ for much of his career, but there’s a real depth to Tom Jones, and on Praise & Blame a newfound sense of perspective. Now in his fifth decade as a professional singer he still has the ability to surprise. Then again, there have always been those who saw a little more in him. Among the devoted viewers of This is Tom Jones was a young Tim Burton, who remembered the show when he came to write Mars Attacks!. “He came to see me do a show in LA and said, ‘I’m writing this film and I want you to be in it,’” Jones chuckles. “He said, ‘I thought to myself, if anybody can save the world it’s Tom Jones!”
Praise & Blame: A Tom Misquote
Praise & Blame 4* NY Daily News Review
Exclusive: Listen to Tom Jones' 'Praise & Blame'
The Guardian online are exclusively streaming all 11 tracks from Praise & Blame for one week. 
To listen to the album in its entirety please click here
Win a Meet & Greet with Tom Jones & Framed & Signed 'Praise & Blame' Album Artwork!!!!!!
To celebrate the release of Tom Jones' Praise & Blame', Play.com are giving away a meet and greet with the great Welsh singer himself. This is an unmissable opportunity to meet one of music's living legends live and in the flesh, plus they are also throwing in some signed and framed album artwork, too!
For your chance to win, all you need to do is answer the question, fill in your details and click Go!
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Absolute Radio Interview - Latitude Festival
Tom Jones: Praise and Blame, 5* Telegraph Review
Tom Jones: back to his bluesy roots
Did Trouble Me
Did Trouble Me - Official Music Video
Tom Jones: Praise And Blame 4* American Songwriter Review
By Rick Moore on July 13th, 2010Tom Jones Praise And Blame Lost Highway Rating: ****
It may seem a little weird to compare Tom Jones to Johnny Cash. But about ten seconds into Jones’s new Praise and Blame CD, that comparison just happens. On this excellent collection of songs examining the human condition, Jones confronts the issues of heaven and hell in a way that Cash did for much of his life, especially toward the end of it. That’s the first basis for comparison. The second basis is that, on this album, Jones and producer Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne) have discovered what producer Rick Rubin figured out with Cash’s American recordings, which is that less really is more. While Praise and Blame is more produced than the drumless Cash series, Johns (himself the guitar player) and Jones have stripped it down to a small group setting instead of the often hyperbolic productions that were Jones’s hallmark for years. Songs like Bob Dylan’s “What Good Am I,” Billy Joe Shaver’s “If I Give My Soul” and John Lee Hooker’s “Burning Hell” are just three of the excellent song choices on this CD that examine the life and post-life choices that we all deal with, especially as we get closer to Jones’s age (he’s 70 now, and looks as good as ever). And the final Cash comparison comes with Jones’s powerful version of “Run On,” the traditional folk spiritual that Cash cut under the title “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” on the posthumous American V recording. While Jones’s version is influenced by Chicago blues and Cash’s was acoustic guitar with an anvil sample, both performances are delivered from the gut and don’t disappear from the jukebox of the brain very soon. A lot of guys his age might seem desperate, making an album with a producer whose work is usually aimed at the college crowd. But Jones manages to sound just as current as Johns’s other clients, and could teach most of them a thing or two vocally. Jones hasn’t been this vital since he screamed “why, why, why” at Delilah over three decades ago. And with guest artists like ’60s organmeister Booker T. and Americana legends Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Jones and Johns have made a real statement in the same way that Rubin, and of course T Bone Burnett, do almost every time they produce an album. That statement is that the same people who set the bar decades ago for so many of today’s acts to measure up to are still making a lot of today’s best music. Praise and Blame raises that bar just a little higher.
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2010/07/tom-jones-praise-and-blame/
Tom Jones: Praise & Blame Preview
Tom Jones Goes Gospel for New Album - Billboard
A French expression best describes the latest news from a Welsh phenomenon-Tom Jones has gone au naturel, and not just by finally letting his grey hair show.
Just weeks after his 70th birthday, the legendary singer adds another page to his résumé with the release of his gospel-flavored album "Praise & Blame." Released July 27 in North America on Lost Highway, and a day earlier internationally on Island, the record launches Jones' new worldwide deal with Universal and is, by his own description, the most back-to-basics recording he's ever made.
"Praise & Blame" was produced by Ethan Johns, who secured guest appearances from Booker T. Jones and Gillian Welch for the sessions, recorded at Real World, near Bath in England's west country.
"I've never worked that live before," Jones says approvingly. "There was no separation between the musicians. They just brought in these tape machines and we did it all in the one [room]. It was like rehearsing something and then taping it, and there's some on there that are only one take."
The end result is a big departure from Jones' more familiar pop-soul sound, last heard on 2008's "24 Hours" (Parlophone/EMI), which reached No. 105 on the Billboard 200 and sold 54,000 U.S. copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. A regular on the Billboard Hot 100 since the '60s, Jones' U.S. album sales during the SoundScan era total 2.5 million. "24 Hours" peaked at No. 32 in the United Kingdom, where Jones last hit the top 10 with "Tom Jones & Jools Holland" (Warner), a collaboration with the English musician and host of BBC TV's long-running live music series "Later."
The new album sees Jones interpreting the likes of John Lee Hooker, the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson in a rootsy style that's clearly close to his heart as well as his R&B musical roots.
"We wanted it to be of a gospel nature, but an earthy gospel," he says. "So we listened to a lot of gospel records, the Staples Singers and Elvis, of course, but I wanted to take it somewhere else. The idea was to do a live, honest type of thing, but songs that meant something. There's some on there I feel that will stop you in your tracks."
Jones introduced the album with a version of Bob Dylan's "What Good Am I?" on "Later" in May during which, he says, "you could hear a pin drop-which is always a good indication."
That song was then serviced to U.K. radio alongside the Hooker cover "Burning Hell," with the latter being playlisted by the country's most listened-to station, AC-formatted BBC Radio 2. A second U.K. double-sided release, featuring the Susan Werner-penned "Did Trouble Me" and "Don't Knock," previously recorded by country star Don Gibson, is due July 27.
Jones performed a well-received London showcase June 3, attended by international executives and media.
"Everyone was blown away by the amazing performance," Universal Music U.K. international director of marketing Chris Dwyer says, "which explained more about the record than any words could."
Now both Island and Lost Highway are pinpointing the right promotional vehicles-but they're likely to be different from Jones' usual mainstream slots, with the singer already making a June 1 appearance on alternative network BBC 6 Music.
"We're being careful to choose media appearances that will preserve the integrity of the record," Dwyer says, although she says major TV appearances will follow in the fall.
"We've kept stuff open on purpose," Jones says. "I've got to do two weeks in [Las] Vegas in August, because I've got a contract there, but now we've got to work to [choose shows that will] present the album properly."
Kim Buie, Nashville-based VP of A&R for Lost Highway, says the U.S. label is also in the process of sifting through media opportunities. "Burning Hell" was serviced to triple A and noncommercial stations as well as alternative specialty shows the week of June 14, before an impact date during the first week of July. But while the new record seems likely to have more media credibility than Jones' '60s pop output, Buie is convinced the album will still have mainstream appeal.
"When you hear 'Tom Jones gospel,' that's going to give a different impression to 'Rev. Franklin gospel,' " Buie says. "It has impact when people hear it because there are genuine roots there."
"I've got the ability, I know that," Jones says of his new direction. "And I love trying things."
Watch Tom Jones' Performance of 'Burning Hell' on Jonathan Ross
Tom Jones to Play at The Prince’s Trust Rock Gala 2010
Statement from Tom Jones' Management
On behalf of Tom Jones, we'd like to say this about an article published on page 3 of the Sunday Times, published last Sunday July 4th:
Praise & Blame is not an album of 'Hymns from the Common Book of Prayer'. The work draws from the traditional American Spiritual repertoire that has themes of choice and consequence, responsibility, struggle, temptation, good and evil--all universal themes of the worldly journey of both the body and spirit.
Tom and his producer Ethan Johns chose and developed these songs because they became, through working together live in the studio--genuine, true, performances of worth. Musically, the song interpretations are influenced by forms as diverse as soul, country, folk, blues, gospel, punk and rock, producing unique layers of sound, feel and meaning that cannot be categorised in a particular genre or era.
There is nothing to say about the article that contains this contemptuous email, except that the creative and marketing teams at Island Records have been nothing but genuinely enthusiastic and supportive of this landmark album. Please see www.islandrecords.co.uk/ for their own comment.
Praise & Blame is released on July 26th 2010.
Review: Tom Jones- Praise and Blame - No Depression
Posted by Adam Sheets on July 7, 2010 at 4:30pm
In 1969, when Elvis Presley made his return to live performing at Las Vegas's International Hotel (later to be renamed the Las Vegas Hilton) his goal was to create a musical experience that contained all of the great forms of American music: folk, pop, rock, country, blues, R&B, gospel. His Vegas period is often thought of as the worst point in his career and is lampooned by critics, music fans, and impersonators alike. Elvis himself even became fed up with performing there after a while. Yet, at least during the first few years, he succeeded in his goal musically.
The entire career of Welsh singer Tom Jones invites comparisons to Presley's Vegas period. In fact, the two men were good friends who often attended one another's shows (during one particularly interesting show, Jones introduced Elvis to the audience and asked him to perform a song. He declined, deciding to entertain the audience with a 20-minute karate demonstration instead. It was 1974 and he acted weird on stage quite often that year) and Elvis was even inspired to record "Green, Green Grass of Home" after hearing Jones' take on the song. The similarities don't end there though: both share a unique and powerful voice and an excellent taste in material to record. However, Jones did not have the groundbreaking string of classic music that Elvis did from 1954-1958, so critics let him get away with far less. Thus, as Jones' reputation as an extraordinary entertainer grew with every pair of panties thrown onto a Las Vegas stage, his estimation in the minds of music fans and critics lessened.
"Lost Highway to release Tom Jones", I read here a few months back. I was aware of only a few of Jones' pop hits, his phenomenal vocal chords, and his reputation for being an entertainer above anything else. I was unaware that he had recorded a string of country albums back in the '70s and '80s, so my first thought was that the label was attempting to cash in on the stripped-down successes of other aging artists in recent years: Johnny Cash, Robert Plant, Neil Diamond, etc. Then I heard the first single.
I'll tell you about that in a few minutes, but first I will share with you another similar experience. A couple of years ago I watched a film entitled Reign Over Me. The star of the film was Adam Sandler and I had always enjoyed him as an entertainer and a comedian. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, just a few laughs at the end of a long day. But as I watched Sandler's character sitting in the lobby of a psychiatrist's office weeping as he told of his family who had been killed in the September 11th attacks, I began to respect him as an actor. By the time the credits rolled, I was amazed at what I felt, and still feel, to be an Oscar-worthy performance. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I sat listening to Tom Jones' take on the blues standard "Burning Hell," half expecting to be amused by the entire thing. Instead my image of Tom Jones changed from a set of vocal chords ready to please a crowd of old ladies to a serious recording artist. (I ask that long-time fans of Jones not be too hard on me. After all, I'm sure that there were some people unaware of the musical genius that is Neil Diamond prior to 12 Songs.)
"What good am I if I'm like all the rest?" the 70-year-old singer nearly whispers to open the album. Is the question rhetorical? Is he talking to himself? The performance, a cover of a somewhat obscure Dylan tune where Jones is backed up by only a sparse rhythm section, is almost prayer-like in its gentle quietness and with its heartfelt vocals. Yet no answer is given to this or Jones' other questions throughout the song, leaving the listener to ponder the answers and making it a quite haunting piece of music.
Things speed up a lot on "Lord Help", a blues-rock spiritual where Jones shouts a request to the Lord to help the poor and needy, the sinners, the fatherless children, and the war-torn people of this land. The band is especially brilliant here with blistering electric guitar and organ. This track is almost Hendrix-like in a way.
"Did Trouble Me" is the third track and it sounds as if it was recorded inside of a church confessional. "When I let things stand that should not be," he pleadingly sings, "My Lord did trouble me/When I held my head too high, too proud, my Lord did trouble me/When I raised my voice a little too loud, my Lord did trouble me." The main attraction here is not the excellent voice, but rather the emotion and heart behind it. It is peculiar to say this of a track by a white Welsh singer known for playing Las Vegas, especially of a track that prominently features the banjo, but this is soul music at its best.
"Strange Things" is another traditional spiritual, this time given a rockabilly arrangement. The band really is smoking here and Jones manages to sound half his age.
"Burning Hell" is the first track I heard from the album and it is still one of the best. This version of the John Lee Hooker classic could almost be described as hard rock or Zepplinesque. Jones defiantly bellows "Maybe there ain't no Heaven, no burning Hell" as if taunting Satan himself before quietly speaking the line "When I die where will I go?" in a way that would make ZZ Top green with envy.
"If I Give My Soul" is perhaps my favorite track here. Written by Billy Joe Shaver, with this truly heartbreaking rendition Jones gives the definitive reading of it and, although I am admittedly in no position to make a statement like this, possibly the best recording of his career. He sings the tune as if he is telling his own life story. Maybe he is. When he speaks of "playing music, traveling with the Devil's band", the voice in my head immediately screamed "Sin City" and when he talks about making his peace with Jesus as a way to gain back the love of his wife and child, I felt sorry for him. The emotion here is all real and it is really the only time on the album where Jones sounds anywhere near 70.
"Don't Knock" is a spiritual done in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard. Jones' passionate singing is equaled by the musicianship of the band and the call-and-response vocals with the gospel choir are excellent although it is a relatively minor track here.
"Nobody's Fault but Mine" is a deep south blues tune, delivered here with an atmosphere somewhat similar to the work of Tom Waits. The deeply spiritual tune finds Jones admitting that "If I died and my soul be lost, it's nobody's fault but mine" before a Creedence-like guitar solo takes over.
"Didn't It Rain" is a traditional upbeat gospel number and this version perhaps is the best display of Jones' vocals as well as the instrumental prowess of the piano player.
"Ain't No Grave" is given an arrangement very similar to the version by Johnny Cash. This is not the definitive version of the song, nor the best performance on the album although there are really no problems with it.
"Run On" is the album's final track and it has been recorded by countless singers including Elvis and Johhny Cash (as "God's Gonna Cut You Down"). So what is amazing is the fact that Jones and producer Ethan Johns managed to give it their own incredible twist, complete with a Jimmy Reed guitar riff.
I hadn't really intended to write a review of this album so soon. It doesn't even come out for another two weeks. I had simply sat down to write down a few initial thoughts and began writing the review anyway. In closing, you should know that not everybody is a fan of this album. In fact, David Sharpe, the VP of the album's distributor Island Records publicly made an ass of himself upon hearing the album for the first time (follow that link if you want to know, in a nutshell, everything that is wrong with the music business). His own label is against him, which must be a strange feeling for a man who has tried for the better part of five decades to please everybody. But as a wise man once said on a classic record, "You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself". Tom Jones made this album for himself, but I think you will enjoy it as well if you just give it a chance. So what if his voice would lend itself just as well to a Broadway musical as it does to these old gospel numbers? We can't all be Bob Dylan.
