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No Regrets: The Very Best Of Tom Rush

Tom Rush - No Regrets: The Very Best Of Tom Rush Audio CD

A fair review of the Tom Rush "No Regrets: The Very Best Of Tom Rush" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Tom Rush reviews here, or go back to the Tom Rush tabs.

Band: Tom Rush
Title: No Regrets: The Very Best Of Tom Rush
Rating:

Release Date: 1999-10-05
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: San Francisco Bay Blues 2: Mobile-Texas Line 3: Panama Limited 4: On the Road Again 5: Galveston Flood 6: Joshua Gone Barbados 7: Urge for Going 8: No Regrets 9: Lost My Driving Wheel 10: Child's Song 11: Merrimack County 12: Kids These Days 13: Mother Earth 14: Ladies Love Outlaws 15: Dreamer 16: Jamaica, Say You Will 17: River Song

Another One Song CD for me
His very best tune was "I Lost My Drivin Wheel. I like Tom Rush. " It has such a lonesome sound to it, long slide Dobro or National Steel weeping in the background, creates a very haunting song. I think that indeed Tom Rush was looking for that sound and he got it.

As for the rest of the stuff on the album I didn't really care for it all that much. One song he talks his way thru, didn't impress me at all. Come on Tom you got a great voice sing it for Pete's sake.

If you don't know about Tom Rush or are unsure of his style and music I'd pass on this album. If you are like me and want one song on it them bite the bullet and buy it, that's my advice.

Great Songs
It really is a fabulous collection! His voice has such a soothing effect on me. As a long time Tom Rush fan, I agree with all the reviewers here of "No Regrets". I just lay back and close my eyes and for a little while, I am transported to a serene place. When my mother had died suddenly when I was 15, I remember my older sister (who got me interested in Tom Rush) always played his music. Well, "Drivin' Wheel" had just come out, I believe, and I grabbed her LP of Tom Rush's when she was out one night and played that song loud. I could just picture the guy's car broken down and he's in the middle of a snowstorm, calling his wife/girlfriend on a pay phone, to tell her he loves her and he is trying to get to her. ("I gave my promise I'd be there with you by Saturday night". ) And at that minute, even at the young age of 15, I realized that with my mother gone, I did "feel like some old engine that lost my driving wheel. ".

Great songs endure. Only the date changes.
He was the most famous folk singer ever to graduate from Harvard --- the king of a category of one. And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

When Joni Mitchell showed those lyrics to Tom Rush, she was a 23-year-old nobody. But he had a record deal, and she was two years away from one. And so, when it came time for him to go into the studio again, he not only used three of Mitchell's songs, he took "The Circle Game" as the title of that 1968 record.

1968. If you're of a certain age, that year sparks so many memories. But if you're younger, just the opposite --- you're almost surely sick of hearing about "The Sixties". Well, here's a surprise. I'm of a certain age, and I published a book about my generation in 1968 --- Notes from the New Underground, if you must know --- and, believe me, I too am way over that terrible/wonderful year.

Or was, until I started listening to Tom Rush again. "The Circle Game", his first record to get a big label push, was released late in 1968, and it sure fit the mood of my gang. Rush was a baritone, his voice reassuring as oatmeal. He was as unhurried and relaxed as Leonard Cohen. But he was a folkie who was only gently electric; this was no Dylan, rocking your world at every turn. And Rush had an ear for talent. In addition to Joni Mitchell, he more or less discovered the as yet unrecorded James Taylor and Jackson Browne.

But there was something more. Tom Rush was just 27, but he seemed to. . . know stuff. For "The Circle Game" was a song cycle. Not trippy like "Sgt. Pepper" but oddly mature, charting the enthusiasms of youth --- love and energy and what Joni Mitchell calls the "urge for going" --- and then moving on to breaking up with a lover and leaving your parents and being okay about being alone. And maybe, given the title song, even looking down the road a few years. Or decades.

Now the decades have passed, and Tom Rush is still at it. In his 60s, he has a young daughter --- "I thought I'd have my own grandchild and cut out the middle man" --- and gives a sane number of concerts a year. He has impressive restraint. He made ten albums in the first dozen years of his career, but either the stream dried out or he became allergic to recording. No matter. New material is unimportant when we're talking about Tom Rush; the old more than suffices.

You have only to watch the video of "Remember", the novelty song that is a winner when he performs and is closing in on four million viewers on YouTube, to grasp his appeal. The guy who more or less invented the persona of the laid back singer/songwriter --- the performer who was James Taylor before there was a James Taylor --- is an evergreen. His voice holds up. His guitar is still spare and evocative. He still has the wry wit that would go so well with a mug of coffee and a thin smoke around a campfire.

That Tom Rush still has it has to be reassuring to his aging audience. His confident survival sends the clearest possible message: "You're not getting older, you're getting better. " But the coin has another face. We are, as the song says, "captive on the carousel of time. " And so, when boomers consider who we were when we first heard certain songs and who we are now, we blink and ask ourselves: Why do I need glasses and wear relaxed-fit pants --- where did the years go? So every Rush concert is an irony; his fans are people who first heard his music when they were leaving home and are now the ones being left.

Tom Rush isn't flashy. He never had the hit song everyone can hum. But if you're looking for a Harvard man who knows how you feel and wouldn't mind singing your feelings for you. . . well, here's an overlooked boomer god tipping his hat and inviting you to settle in for a listen.

.

The Very Best of Tom Rush
For all Tom Rush fans of old and new this really IS the very best!.

One or two regrets (but not big ones)
Rush originally issued. I can't add much to the other reviews, but I'll have to second another reviewer's comment that the lushly orchestrated version of "No Regrets" that was included in the record was inferior to the stark, spare version Mr. And I, too, miss Bo Diddly's "Who Do You Love?" and wish that Mr. Rush could have found room for it.
But this CD would be a keeper for the "Lost my Driving Wheel" track alone, largely thanks to the incomparable David Bromberg, whose masterful slide guitar slices right through to the heart of the piece; I simply can't imagine the song without it. And thanks for "Urge for Going" . . . the definitive version of the song, even though I find Dave van Ronk's take on it equally compelling (although neither version is ever likely to be mistaken for the other).

You can see a complete list of all Tom Rush discography, or go back to the Tom Rush tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.