Artist:     Erin Enderlin

Album:     Faulkner County

Label:     Blaster Records

Release Date:     11.1.19

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The women of Faulkner County are complicated. Sketched out as deeply conflicted, often lonely characters caught up in desperate circumstances and riddled with guilt, regret and resignation, they reveal their vulnerability and fortitude in equal measure, as singer-songwriter Erin Enderlin’s hard-luck stories gracefully unfold with disarmingly poetic candor and detail. Drinking is encouraged here. Tell the bartender to leave the bottle. The booze will soften the harsh truth of her late-night confessions.

In visiting gritty factory towns, dirty truck stops, empty dive bars, fleabag motel rooms and the intimacy of cold, sterile bedrooms in need of warmth, Enderlin is stalked by classic country sounds and melodies from a golden bygone age. She gives in to them without hesitation, her salt-of-the-earth, bleary-eyed balladry tastefully and tenderly seduced by a subtle mix of rustic and cosmopolitan instrumentation. Mellow electric keyboards take steel guitar swoon, brushed percussion and plucked acoustic guitar as slow-dancing partners in the forlorn “Tonight I Don’t Give a Damn,” while long draws of unvarnished fiddle and soft drumming thump and textured clacks mingle with some of those same natural elements in the similarly cast “I Can Be Your Whiskey,” as Enderlin sings, “I can drown the memory you’re trying to forget.” That one-night stand might turn into something more co-dependent, as it does on the aching “Use Me Again.”

Aside from the muscular churn and hot desire of “A Man With 18 Wheels” and the rapturous, slow-building glory of closer “Run Baby Run,” where Enderlin connects lyrically with the wide-open heart of Bruce Springsteen, Faulkner County comes off as a sad place. The family dysfunction of a beautifully rendered “Broken” is all too familiar, its effects long lasting. In “Till It’s Gone,” Enderlin writes of finding humble lodging to retreat to in an attempt to drink away the pain of lost love and bad choices. Unfurling lines like “I burned up all my chances like this book of motel matches” with sober clarity, Enderlin—she prefers to narrate in the first person—unflinchingly confronts the past without knowing if brighter days are ahead or not.

There are no happy endings in Faulkner County, just soft caresses of harmony vocals, elegant twirls of mandolin, blades of strings that cut until you bleed and brief cascades of piano. Hope mushrooms in the ascendant “Run Baby Run” like time-lapsed video of white cloud masses, that gathering optimism captured in these words: “Run like your lungs are on fire and the road is the air.” And in a resilient “These Boots,” where her “heels are dug in and roots run deep,” Enderlin is tough, traveling in their muddied, frayed, beat-up condition to Bakersfield to walk the same streets as heroes Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. It’s no wonder her clever, insightful and affecting writing has stars like Alan Jackson, Lee Ann Womack and Luke Bryan, not to mention Rodney Crowell and Reba McEntire, chomping at the bit to interpret her songs.

—Peter Lindblad