Green Light, the latest LP from Kansas poet and songwriter Timmy Ray, is a spare and beautiful offering. Ray’s clear and melodic delivery puts his lyrics front and center, and given his glistening insights into character and place, that’s a good thing. “We were singing songs we swore we’d never outgrow, but peace and quiet are taking their toll. Let me know how you’re holding up” he croons on “Let Me Know.” It’s a wonder we all share, I think, about the possibility that we’ve betrayed our younger selves. The song, on one level, is about staying alive, “Gave up another vice,” but rather than maundering in self-affirmation, an unfortunate trend in contemporary song that does little to distinguish the genre from self-help memes, Ray resigns himself to existential realities, subverting staid middle class values in the process. 

Timmy Ray is that rare songwriter who honors the tradition without aggrandizing the vocation. He approaches his craft with humility, yes, but he’s also honest about the compulsive aspect of making art. “Let’s pretend our words will make a difference,” he sings on “Gold and Silver.” There’s an energy here that’s sardonic and splenetic. Ray, mercifully, is not writing songs to change the world. He’s empathetic, but he doesn’t turn that into a self-congratulatory currency. His ethos is in writing songs because he can’t help it, not because he thinks his songs will help. It’s Ray Wylie Hubbardesque, or Baudelairean if you will.  

Ray’s metronymic rhythm guitar strumming holds just the right modulations to allow his beautiful singing voice to get out in front of the music. Ray eschews the plectrum and strums with his thumb and fingers, a minimal right hand technique that serves his lyrics well. He punctuates his chord progressions with artful bass-string walks into heartbreaking minor modal shifts. A great example of this happens in interludes before and after the chorus in “Let Me Know.” These inventive progressions earn the songs their melancholy as well as their moments of elation. “God Lives in This River,” an iconoclastic spiritual that takes us back to the antediluvian God of nature, not the dogmatic God of the church, treating us to another of Ray’s adroit minor progressions whose mood is perfectly tailored to the mystical skepticism expressed in the words.

I heard Timmy Ray play at the Osage Arts Center this past August and was immediately taken with his music and his kindhearted approach to audience engagement. The standout song for me that night was “Roadside Assistance,” so I was thrilled to find it included on the LP. Timmy Ray’s an erudite poet, and it’s evident in his precise utilization of proper nouns, especially names of highways whose miles he’s wandered on his way to and from his Kansas home. “I need roadside assistance on I-95…” Or in “Kansas 39,” where he sings, “Between the memories and the caffeine, I drove straight through the night. It took me 39 highways, but finally I’m right.” It makes the listener want to crank up this album and drive down K-39. It’s also a perfect Homeric close to the album, our anti-hero discovering what he must’ve known all along: a midwestern Ithaca where subjective time still looms.      

Timmy Ray is a country artist from Southeast Kansas. His newest album, Green Light, dropped July 26th, 2024. You can find Timmy on TikTok and Instagram (@timmyraymusic) and listen to his music on all streaming platforms.