Track Listing

1. Picture from Life's Other Side
2. Worried Mind
3. Ballad of Lonnie Wolf
4. Hope You Don't Mind
5. God Created Woman
6. Blood Evidence
7. Girl Who Made Me Sick
8. Greasy Hands
9. Vietnam
10. Just Because
11. No Woman's Flesh But Hers
12. Bad Memories
13. Mystery Woman
14. Butcher's Son
15. Wish I'd Been Honest

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137319 in Music
• Released on: 1999-08-17
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Songs For Swingin' (From A Noose) Lovers!
The first time I listened to this cd I did not give it the respect it deserved. I was doing various chores around my apartment, only half-listening to what was coming out of the speakers. After a few songs I shrugged it off as one I'd bought out of curiousity and put on another cd. A couple of months later I picked up Bloodshot's 5 year anniversary collection and was knocked all around the room by his duet with Kim Sherwood Caso on Hell or High Water. I decided to give Pictures From Life's Other Side another listen. It soom became clear what an idiot I had been to dismiss it as I had done. This time the discovery of a major artist with his own unique interpretation of rural American music rang joyously in my ears.

Dowd seems to draw a lot of comparisons to Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. In a way these are apt comparisons, especially Waits. But more than anything they are meant to indicate that the lesser known Dowd's work is equal to that of some our most respected singer/songwriters who are famous for dealing explicitly with dark themes. But where Cave, Cohen and Waits have established original and justly celebrated voices for themselves over decades of achievement, Dowd entered the music business with his first album in 1997 at the age of fifty. Making up for lost time, Dowd has recently released his fourth album, The Pawnbroker's Wife, while gaining a devoted following, touring and appearing on such worthwhile projects as the Bloodshot double cd as well as the recent Lee Hazelwood tribute album.

Pictures From Life's Other Side kicks off with the title track, perhaps the most creative reinterpretation of a Hank Williams, Sr. song ever released. It begins with Dowd as a sort of stoned carny inviting you over to his tent and as soon as you've settled into this landscape it veers off into an absolutely scorching rocker. At no point does this ever sound like a starched, reverent reading of a classic from our beloved Hank...and yet it captures his haunted spirit better than all but the great man's own recordings.

The one-two punch of I Hope You Don't Mind & God Created Woman are also standout tracks that serve as a perfect blueprint for Dowd's take on romance. The former is a sinsiter rewrite of the blues staple Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl. Except that this time all of the bluster has been violently stripped away and we are left in the profoundly uneasy company of an aged man who states his obsession with a child in the scariest terms imagineable.

God Created Woman is, love gone wrong subject matter aside, a far more gleeful affair. Kim Sherwood Caso's contributions to Dowd's music simply cannot be overstated. Her voice compliments his world view to a tee while providing a welcome counterbalance at the same time. Here she sings a desperate plea for her lover to "meet me in the parking lot/up on level three/there's something I must show you/there's something you've just got to see." These lines, as sung by Caso, are filled with an ache so unfathomable that it has folded into a detached, narcotic drone and listening to it gives you a palpable sense of danger. The person who is singing this is capable of awful things.

Another revelatory track is the spoken word performance of No Woman's Flesh But Hers. All I can say is that I honestly thought I was going to have to sleep under my bed with the lights on after hearing this the first few times. No song has ever scared me as badly. I loved it!

Pictures From Life's Other Side isn't as consistent as Temporary Shelter (my favorite) or as varied as The Pawnbroker's Wife but it is an important step in the development of one of the most interesting and talented artists to emerge on the music scene in the past ten years. You may have to do some work to eventually sink into his world, but it is an incredibly rewarding adventure I promise you!

Is There a Grammy for "Scariest Album Of The Year"?
Johnny Dowd comes across as the strange reclusive psychopath in Tom Waits' "What's He Building In There?" and with any hope, they will one day work together, somehow. His first album was a five-star, and this even improves upon it. Choice cuts are "Worried Mind", "Bad Memories", "God Created Women" and the psychotic love song "I Hope You Don't Mind". And of course, "No Womans Flesh But Hers", which gains creepiness due to whatever is playing in Dowd's studio as he records it. There's even one of them damn "Hidden CD tracks" at the end that is worthwhile. Definately my favorite album since Jim White's "Wrong-Eyed Jesus". Perhaps one day we will see a new band in the Wilburies/Highwaymen tradition consisting of Waits/Dowd/White and Cave. And Dylan can come if he wishes...

Remarkable.
Dowd's first album, Wrong Side of Memphis, is good, but this, his second, is positively a revalation. Eschewing the determinedly low-fidelity nature of that affair, here he comes out swinging with a full band and a warped, creative production. It isn't perfect--the second half is, it must be noted, somewhat less consistent than the first--but it nonetheless represents another triumph for Our Man Johnny.

One of the most striking components of this album is the incomparable Kim Sherwood-Caso. She did backing lyrics for a few songs on Wrong Side of Memphis, but they weren't very prominent, and, although they did their job perfectly well, one didn't get the impression that any similar singer couldn't have done a comparable job. Here, however, she plays a much more prominent role, to dazzling effect. The first time you hear her bursting in on the choruses of 'Worried Mind' and 'God Created Woman,' it's like the end of the world, and her atmospheric contributions to other songs, if less immediately striking, are no less skillful.

But that's not all this album has to offer. Elsewhere, there's the unhinged raving of 'Butcher's Son.' There's the ethereal atmospherics of 'Vietnam.' There's the quiet, unsettling 'hidden' track. And of course there's 'Just Because.' You may at first think is just sort of goofy, but when you have the chorus stuck in your head for days on end, you'll be singing a different tune. And it features the line "woman loves a man like morphine loves pain." Right on.

Amazingly, it would get even better on Dowd's third album, Temporary Shelter. Nevertheless, Pictures from Life's Other Side is a remarkable piece of work. If you like a bit of ominous weirdness in your music, it's a sure thing.