Review: Brooks Dixon achieves greatness with new album, ‘Rhododendron Highway’
The singer-songwriter reaches new heights with his latest record.
“I’m trying hard to drown out this feeling,” sings Brooks Dixon. His “Midnight Shower” falls down with torrential force, an emotional focal point to his brand new record Rhododendron Highway. As he’s moved through his late 20s, he’s come to realize so much about himself and human existence. The feeling of which he sings springs forth from his being, an unyielding angst that seeks to swallow him whole. “I’ll just keep pushing when it hurts,” he sings. The barbs puncture his side, and he roots himself in place and readies for the incoming storm. Despite life not quite working out the way he supposed, he’s more than content with how things have turned out. Fatherhood shifted something inside him, as did an unexpected medical diagnosis, so much so that this cataclysmic rearranging seeps onto the record and its overarching storyline.
Dixon is a wanderer, a troubadour traipsing through life – salvaging trinkets of pain, loss, happiness, and a profound sense of worth. He stashes these experiences like faded polaroids inside dusty photo albums, locked away in an attic somewhere. “If I go to Charleston, our love will not endure,” he aches in the rollicking opener “Charleston,” setting up both the musical and lyrical gumption for the record. With “Stranger’s Bed,” he wrangles feelings of inadequacy and shuffles around for his purpose. “I just can’t seem to find my place / Everywhere I go seems one big mistake,” he sings.
Where “Would You Say Yes” (written as a proposal for his now-wife) and “Married in the Mountains” delight in telling a heartwarming story about true love, “After All” considers the meaning of the question: “Are we not singing the same old songs, telling the same old stories as the past?” His inquiry isn’t unfounded. As part of the journey to self-actualization, there comes a point where you question everything around you – eventually realizing that we and our art are wonderfully special and unique.
Rhododendron Highway rushes by your eyelids. You blink, and you’ll miss it – at least that’s the experience, enveloping and moving. Brooks Dixon guides you by the hand, weaving you through towering wheat fields and across pavement-cracked highways. The horizon sweeps away from you, and all you have is Dixon’s voice as reedy as the vegetation beneath your feet. 11 tracks seemingly capture the breadth of humanity, as we all toil with backs nearly breaking to find some semblance of hope, identity, and reason for living.
