I’ve always disliked the genre label “easy listening” for how reductive it is and how much more complex some of the music actually is than what is not “easy,” even if the instrumentation might be mellower and more saccharine than, say, an overdriven guitar smashing power chords. The “genre” of “easy listening” always raises the question for me about what makes something “easy” to listen to. In the “Easy Listening” racks at record stores, I’ve seen Sinatra, Count Basie, Roy Orbison, Nina Simone, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others. Outside of a handful of decades, it seems to lack any real coherence in its definitions.

Maybe what makes something “easy listening” at its best is in how the musicians can turn the complicated into the consumable, transposing effort into effortlessness. Poor Player’s new album, Gone with My Guitar, is something I would call “easy listening” in the sense of easy to listen to. Like the traditional easy listening genre, these are songs that reward close listening but still bring enjoyment when paid only casual attention.

The playing throughout the album is easy-going and laid back, never rushed, but always together just enough as needed. The musicians are tasteful and understated in an almost populist way, playing simple parts that almost sound as if the average musician could play themselves. Brian Simon’s electric guitar complements Fredericks’ vocals with the occasional choppy off-beat punch or doubles his vocal line rather than taking off and shredding. Fred Vitale’s piano lines not infrequently have a hint of saloon in them. And you almost don’t even notice the drums on account of how much they blend in with the band. 

Neither the band nor the recording is over-polished. It has the feel of a live album with the occasional, insignificant imperfection that’s been well-equalized or tightened up in the mixing process. Which is really what makes this album good to me in the way a live show is good: it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be good. Sometimes an album can sound perfect to the point where the album becomes the thing more than the performing and where you wonder how—or even if—it could be replicated. That’s certainly not the case with Poor Player. They are comfortable with one another but never so locked in as to sound intimidating or inflexible. 

This album often calls to mind the sound of outlaw country and folk ballad sounds of the 1950s and 1960s with their interest in storytelling and predilection towards minor keys and chords and twangy electric guitar, especially nasally, lower-register licks on songs like “Fare Thee Well.” Throw in the casual, sometimes honky-tonk piano stylings on songs like “Gotta Be a Way (To Some Kind of Lovin’)” and you get a band that shines when called upon but otherwise just provides a great musical foundation for Fredericks’ deceptively smart songwriting.

Fredericks has a remarkable ability as a songwriter to be both folksy in a simple declarative way on songs like “Gotta Be a Way (to Some Kind of Lovin’),” with its string of aphoristic witticisms, yet also literary with the simile-riddled “Holy Ghost Rambler,” which starts each verse off with what would be a cliched simile if it didn’t ramble off in quirky directions on its way to the song’s hook at the end of each verse. Songs like these and “Get Yaself Down,” with its quirky riddles and references show that Fredericks has studied his Dylan and his Springsteen.

Gone with My Guitar is an album of songs that are fun and easy to listen to because, in some ways, we’ve already heard them a thousand times across the decades. And that’s not a bad thing—they don’t push us when we didn’t ask to be pushed and they don’t challenge us where we weren’t looking for an argument or epiphany about innovations in music. The kind of familiarity we already have with these songs make them comfortable rather than cliched, which is where so many songs that lean into genres, tropes, and styles often fail. Fredericks’ songwriting and Poor Player’s musicianship make the difficult sound easy—perhaps even too easy—but still reward careful and repeated listening with the revelation of virtuosic potential held in check for the sake of a song and deeply intelligent thinking packaged for casual consumption. 

Jason Storms is a poet, musician, and critic from Interlochen living in Metro Detroit. His work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fugue, The Dunes Review, The Leon Literary Review, The Museum of Americana and is forthcoming in The Great Lakes Review. He holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.