The United States spent the majority of the 1980's in Recession. Its a fact not frequently remembered. Our image of the 1980's are filled with brightly colored sitcoms about happy orphans who got adopted by wealthy couples and pop singers clad in diamonds and gold lame. There were very few artists documenting the lives of the working class, people like Merle Haggard, John Conlee, John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen. These were people who wrote less about politics than about the people affected by them, about making ends meet on installment plans and getting a Union card for your 18th birthday. Ryan Bingham manages to channel all of these on his latest album Junky Star. It's a powerful and profound album, one that cuts through politics and gets down to the stories. And the stories are as remarkable and gorgeous as anything Bingham ever written.

Bingham opens Junky Star by telling us “the poet writes his song in blood,” a warning to all who may enter that, while they may not need to abandon all hope, they aren't going to find much here. Bingham's voice walks a find line between the rasp of Bruce Springsteen and the growl of Merle Haggard, but winds up more expressive and melodic than either. “Man come to shake my hand rob me of my farm. I shot him dead and I hung my head, drove off in his car,” he sings in the title track, a haunting ballad about a man on the run from the law, drinking where he can and sleeping on the Santa Monica Pier. Its a small detail, but a meaningful one, that characters on Junky Star often find themselves fleeing to Californian, the refuge of Depression era Okies, whose descendants now find themselves fleeing its crushing economy. “Lay My Head on the Rail” take the opposite approach, with a protagonist who fled to Californian and is now making his way home jumping trains and hitch hiking. “Hallelujah” is a striking murder ballad from the perspective of the victim, which finds his ghost haunting the increasingly desperate landscape that lead to his demise. Junky Star works because Bingham settles himself into the role of story teller, refraining from political statements or broad social statements. He is merely here to tell the story. “Its no time for propaganda, or media filled with hate, its no time for scripted messages that slither 'round like snakes,” he warns his peers on “Direction of the Wind.” “You're betting on a long shot because the sure shot has passed,” he sings on “Self-Righteous Wall,” “You're walking the straight and narrow, but you're barefoot on broken glass. The album closes with the third, and most powerful of its murder ballads, “All Choked Up Again,” about a barroom gambler who kills someone who he suspects might be his own father.

Another 20 years have come and gone and we are again in the middle of a recession in a culture that seems unable to document the stories of its working class. That, more than any other theme, has been sorely missing from country music in the past decade. Songs about farmers struggling to keep their land or mill workers finding new jobs after a closure are few an far between. Junky Star is the first album since Sara Storer's remarkable Beautiful Circle to immerse itself so completely in the lives of the working poor. This is an album that pushes aside questions of Wall Street and Main Street and just looks at the people living on the streets themselves. More than being one of the best albums of 2010, it may well be the soundtrack of a Recession no one else has quite figured out how to document.

You can support Ryan Bingham by purchasing this album at Amazon | iTunes.

If you prefer your music on CD, you can purchase this album at Amazon.