Search - Tony Tidwell :: Love Is Not A Word

A couple pulls their car over on the side of the road and slowly dances in the headlights. A fifteen year old girl, awkward and hesitant in her party gown, pauses in the evening gloom outside of a dance, wondering if she should just go home. A man mowing a field stumbles through memory and doubt, telling us that there s a wolf, like time, howling around my heart. Another s life is just a bird with nowhere to light. A broken man becomes a new father and is reborn while watching his daughter play, as he tells her you re the best song I ever wrote. An exhausted and worn-thin worker dreams of nothing more than putting the day to bed and going home to his wife, and in another song we re told the world isn t black and white anymore, it s red, green and blue. In each of the songs on Tony Tidwell s new album "Love Is Not A Word," we re pulled deep into the thoughts of a person who exists in two distinct worlds: the physical, outward walking around side we all see and a deep, shadowy interior life, where instinct and grace are constantly at odds. Tony Tidwell s new album Love Is Not A Word signals both a return and a departure for the Clemson, South Carolina singer/songwriter. His first album in almost ten years, the majority of the songs here are less focused on the rippling, distorted electric guitars and crashing drums of his earlier albums, and lean closer to whispered meditations with closely-harmonized fiddles, Salvation Army-marching band celebrations, lightly strummed acoustic guitars, winding pedal steel, and quiet, humming prayers so closely linked together, it s probably more appropriate to listen to Love Is Not A Word less as an album, and more as a collection of compact, tightly structured short stories. Indeed, Faulkner wrote about this same world, one equally shot through with hushed sunlight and wide, open night.