At last, the Belfast Cowboy lives up to his name by recording a straight-up country album.
Not that he hasn’t travelled down a country road before; 1971’s Tupelo Honey included a pair of bona fide country numbers in, ‘When That Evening Sun Goes Down’ and ‘I Wanna Roo You’ while his 2000 album You Win Again (with Linda Gail Lewis – Jerry Lee’s sister) included a triptych of Hank Williams songs.
But here he immerses himself completely in a country mode, (even donning a Stetson on the cover), interpreting 12 personal favourites and also coming up with three country-style originals. Surprisingly the album was recorded not in Nashville with Music City’s finest players and producers, as you might expect, but in Dublin with his touring band. The studio approach – arrangement and production-wise like Elvis Costello’s similar exercise on Almost Blue – recalls classic '60s and early '70s Nashville, but the choice of material is anything but predictable.
The better known numbers include straightforward takes on songs like Hank Williams’ ‘Your Cheating Heart’ and ‘Half As Much’, recorded by Patsy Cline, and Webb Pierce’s classic ‘There Stands The Glass’. His reading of Rodney Crowell’s ‘Till I Can Gain Control Again’ doesn’t quite match Emmylou Harris’ definitive version, but it’s well worth hearing. Some might find it hard to take Morrison singing the leery lines, “Don’t you feel my thigh, you’ll want to move up high,” on ‘Don’t You Make Me High’ but he clearly sees the funny side of it and cracks up at the end of the song.
His voice is in fantastic shape throughout – just listen to the smouldering intensity he summons on the old Chuck Willis number ‘What Am I Living For?’ or his impressively authentic take on ‘Things Have Gone To Pieces’, made famous by George Jones. Of the originals, the title track is a highlight, along with the Ray Charles-like ‘Playhouse’. But you wonder who he could possibly be thinking about on ‘This Has Got To Stop’, when he sings the line: “I’ve just had enough, I’m gonna call your bluff, this has got to stop.”
An enjoyable album that gets better with each listen, Pay The Devil will satisfy long time fans and might even win him some new ones.