Jim Lauderdale Is at Peace in ‘My Favorite Place’

Jim Lauderdale has been writing songs and working in Nashville since the final years of the Jimmy Carter administration. After writing dozens of hits for other folks, he’s averaged at least one solo album a year for the last 30 years. (In 2013, Lauderdale started his own record label, Sky Crunch, to accommodate the expansive catalog that he’s still currently writing.)

Following last September’s bluegrass collaboration with the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, The Long and Lonesome Letting Go, his newest is My Favorite Place, marking his 37th studio album. Recorded at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios with his longtime touring band, the Game Changers (guitarists Craig Smith and Frank Rische, bassist Jay Weaver, drummer Dave Racine, and singer Lille Mae Rische,) My Favorite Place’s 11 songs find Lauderdale, where he’s most comfortable: in front of his friends, singing his latest batch of Americana tunes.

Leading off with the barroom waltz of the title track, Lauderdale duets with Lille Mae Rische about finding peace in the presence of his beloved. It sounds trite here, but Lauderdale remains the consummate professional, delivering it all with a real jukebox purity. On “Mrs. Green”, he resolves a verse by singing, “He’s not enough of a man to understand the woman that you are.” There’s a lyrical vulnerability unfamiliar to the traditional Americana perspective. In the press release for My Favorite Place, Lauderdale said much the same: “This story, with these characters, is unlike anything I’ve been a part of before.” This is saying a lot for a man whose writing credits number in the hundreds.

There’s something about “The Lightning Tree” that feels like a holdout from one of Lauderdale’s early-1990s writing sessions. Hold on for the second half, though, when the torch ballad becomes a full-on Western gallop. The best Jim Lauderdale songs all find him remorseful, echoing Webb Pierce and crying in his beer. In “You’ll Be Gone By Then”, he imagines a future that he knows will never materialize. “You’d be so proud of me / I’d have the right to be / We’d want to shout amen / But you’ll be gone by then.”

“Sweethearts Remember” finds Lauderdale dueting with Lille Mae Rische. This tune perfectly exhibits his band’s ability to make a song that’s this traditional seem radically adventurous, featuring elements of ragtime and jazz manouche. They aren’t making songs like this much anymore; we’re all worse off because of it.

Jay Weaver’s bass playing on “Don’t You Treat ‘Em That Way” is immaculate, and on “Baby Steps,” Lauderdale shows us what he can make from a stone simple lyrical conceit: “I’m taking baby steps / Instead of crawling.” He pushes his voice to its absolute length here, still in some ways that same hungry kid, just trying to sell his song to whoever’s in the room. 

For “I’m a Lucky Loser”, Lauderdale enlists the most outside help, including members of the Fabulous Superlatives’ Chris Scruggs and Kenny Vaughn on electric guitars and Will Van Horn on pedal steel. With all the assembled faculty, it would have been tempting to get a few more instrumental breaks here, but instead, Lauderdale calls it a quick two-and-a-half minutes. 

In “We Ought to Celebrate”, Craig Smith and Frank Rische’s mirrored guitars could have been pulled straight out of the first Dickey Betts & Great Southern records. My Favorite Place wraps up with “You’ve Got a Shine” and “What’s Important After All”. On the former, Lauderdale wails smooth over a pure county fair country rocker. On the latter, he shows off the result of decades of writing songs, his rhymes nearly academic, his melody almost starry-eyed. Lauderdale could easily play this one at the Opry or on the main stage of some barn bluegrass festival he’s headlining, and that may be his real genius.    

Look: there’s nothing out of the ordinary here, but there’s still a reason each Jim Lauderdale record is worth writing about. He’s a true constant living in a ten-year town, steadily delivering solid country and Americana music each time he puts out a new album or steps up to a microphone. He’s one of the last true country troubadours, and on My Favorite Place, he continues his Americana story with reliability and grace.