Review: Erik Dylan addresses immigration, racism & death with ‘Baseball on the Moon’ -

I remember the day like it was yesterday. The sun was scorching the earth. The view was a magnificent display of wonder, greenery spreading out around us on that ridge, a cool wind feathering my hair. Names of donors were chiseled in brick at our feet. The Hospice bench was cool from the morning dew, but as the minutes ticked closer to noon, the air began to thicken with anticipation. The fleeting moment of elation was cut in an instant. “It’s getting time,” she spoke, breathy and unwavering. My sister and I locked eyes and then made our way into the bright but sterilized bedroom. There awaiting on the bed, grasping at his last breaths, lay my father in his most brittle form. ALS is merciless, and for a person who had lived such an active and determined and joyous life as him, you’d think he must have done something truly unthinkable to be damned this way. My uncle had reassured me that he had found salvation in those last few months, letting go of a mortal coil that had all but betrayed him and made peace with what would come next.

We gathered around his bedside. A sprightly, porcelain-faced ministry student stood at the foot of the bed, picturesque and somehow detached. He was just a vessel of a godly word, a hymn I can’t quite recall pouring from his rosy lips. A heaviness dropped like a cloak around my shoulders. I clenched my eyes closed, tightening them as hard as I could. With each phrase, each lilting lift that was supposed to be comforting in this time of emotional turmoil, I could feel my father’s life leaving his body. When the pastor-to-be lingered on the last few notes, his voice vanishing like dust into the sun’s rays that peeked through the curtains, I watched my dad die. He took his last breath. His face grew ashen. His muscles creaked and then fell flat from his bones. It was done….

That was three and a half years ago.

So, when I sat down to dig into Erik Dylan‘s new record, Baseball on the Moon, I knew I could expect some hearty, rock-induced songwriting about middle America, being young, finding love and picking up the pieces. But I don’t think I was ready for “Funerals & Football Games” (written with Greg Becker), the second song of the lineup, an earthy but wonderfully evocative song about Dylan’s father’s way of shielding him from the brunt of the world. Dylan is a modest singer, painting with clarity and precision and allowing the words to culminate in a vivid, breathtaking landscape. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and that forthright approach hangs ceremoniously onto his songwriting. The drums kick in. The guitars swell, already tearing at the heartstrings without ever really meaning to. “You know I wear my heart on my sleeve / Under a flannel shirt and this factory / Like my daddy did and his dad before / Building trains and planes and welding things through every single war,” he sings, unmasking a song that not only depicts the brutality of adulthood but also scratching into the roles of parents and their children. While the focus remains solely on the everyday, Dylan lugs around a solemn glow through a heartfelt story of losing his job, a universally-bound, personally-affecting story. “Today some guy from out of town gathered all of us around / Said, ‘Don’t worry,’ then turned around and shut the whole damn factory down.”

He never loses his resolve to be a force of strength for the people in his life. “Don’t shed no tears, don’t show no fear / Just shut your mouth, just drink your beer / Just suck it up, it ain’t no thing / This ain’t no funeral or football game,” he sings on the chorus. While he holds things together on the outside, his vocal deceives him, weighing him down as the song progresses. The payoff comes on the two-line bridge, a moment of vulnerability that confirms he really isn’t all that OK deep down inside. “The only time you gonna see me cry / When my boy suits up with my old number / On the day my momma dies,” Dylan avows, the tough-guy exterior falling away as his voice cracks and barrels forward. He has a rather endearing way of scrawling life’s harshest moments, as if the sky overhead was shattered into pieces by a low-flying jet, its white tail rippling in the wake of reality. My father was not always the good guy; on more than a few occasions, I was downright terrified of him. But he taught me the value of hard work, and “Funerals and Football Games” plays with humanity’s complexity quite wonderfully.

“13th Floor,” a co-write with Lee Miller, is another tear-soaked stunner, a plodding but potent neon-basted ballad about cherished things that slip from our grasp. “There’s a touchdown pass I dropped as the clock ran out / The words I shoulda said to my dad but it’s too late now / The guardrail that my buddy ran through when they was pullin’ me out / I already knew just what I’d lost,” he sings, framed as a narrator depicting a list of the temporary, gliding as hauntingly as the past lingers on our lips. The weight drops further on the chorus, picking up the last line of the first stanza: “I keep that little white cross / On the 13th floor, where there ain’t no door / And I try to ignore the ghost draggin’ those chains around / It’s where you keep your blacks, your blues / Your dreams fell throughs, the ones you lose / That you can’t live without, and they’re just hangin’ out / On the 13th floor, gotta put all the hurt somewhere…”

Dylan’s reflections of life and death, the ephemeral that gives us glee or nightmares, ebb and flow throughout Baseball on the Moon, which Dylan self produced, along with Paul Cosette as tracking engineer and Chad Carlson on mixing. The title song (written with Michael Reaves and Douglas Waterman), which sees him hit for the sky with a Luke Combs feature, is a joyous anthem for the dreamers, the underdogs, the outliers. “They’re gonna cut you down, tell you your best ain’t good enough / But your “want to, got tos” gotta be bigger than your givin’ up / And you can wave to all the critics when you’re playin’ baseball on the moon / Here’s to the dreamers like you,” he promises. Combs’ solo third verse turns the narrative to the musician’s life, as he opens, “You say you’re gonna pack your car full of prayers and an old guitar / Yeah, they’re ll gonna tell ya that you might not get too far.” And later, as almost a passing of the torch moment, he sings directly to Dylan, “When you get that first gold record, they’re gonna say they always knew…”

Despite the empowering, anthemic nature, the song remains rather sobering. There’s a grounded truth that sets the tone for the album, raw on the edges, emotional at the center, an altogether sincere and engaging snapshot of life. It’s a simple premise, but one which witnesses Dylan soaring high and hitting home run after home run. Rick Springfield in nature, “Someday” (with Steve Earle as co-conspirator) struggles with the constricting boundaries of a hometown, as he longs to break free from the city lines. At the very next turn, with the gravelly “Ain’t My Town” ode, a co-write with Jeff Hyde and Waterman, Dylan bemoans Hollywood’s perceptions of small-town living. “We like chasin’ girls in cut off jeans, but that don’t mean that’s all we think about, son / And folks ’round here we like cold beer, but that don’t mean our world revolves around one,” he chides, a flick of the lip into a bit of a sneer. “On the radio it’s alway Friday night dirt roads, gettin’ drunk and loud / Makes me wanna turn it down, ’cause that ain’t my town.” The chorus then serves as a sermon, of sorts, about what it really means to come from a map dot town, professing, “That ain’t my town, that ain’t my life, ’cause God I’m a man with one stoplight / It’s got heart and it’s got soul a whole lot deeper than the shallow / So don’t go paintin’ pictures of what you don’t know about / Puttin’ words in my mouth, ’cause that ain’t my town.”

The Jaida Dryer-penned “Kerouac Kings (also with Reaves and Dylan) slings together vintage rock with breezy, crisp roots to capture the allure and rejuvenation of the open road. “Midnight Mary’s and Kerouac Kings / Old Crow Whiskey, Black Diamond Strings / Shackled and chained like slaves to the game,” Dylan snarls with pluck and fearlessness, gusts of electric guitar biting at his heels. His smokey baritone works in most musical conditions, most of all in these rambling, loose-fitting refrains. “Young in America” (co-written with Andrew DeRoberts) chugs briskly, too, as he recounts a young man’s prison time for crystal possession and the aftereffects of that one wayward mistake. “Cell block tattoo, blue ink on his arm / Can’t get a job, can’t go back to the farm / To be young in America,” he pontificates over the rumble of a proverbial engine, streamlining one of America’s many problems.

The mournful “Comeback Kid,” co-written with Hyde and Ross Copperman and recorded by Kip Moore (off 2015’s Wild Ones), is an apt follow-up, exposing the more troublesome worries beneath the surface. “I’m a new used car with a couple dents / And I’ll get where I’m goin’ / ‘Cause I know where I’ve been / When it all goes south, I’m gonna rise again / Just call me the comeback kid,” he prayers, as a whisper to himself and his wife, the beat-up automobile churning as quickly as it can down the road. “Touchdown Town” (penned with Driver Williams) revs up his idealist spirit again (“Guitar kid in a touchdown town / In a black t-shirt with his head in the clouds / Can’t fit in and he can’t get out / Guitar kid in a touchdown town”), while “Flatland Sunrise” (another DeRoberts co-write) bends his bothered blue-collar heart around worries of being a farmer (“Starin’ at a flatland sunrise, wonderin’ how we’re gonna get by / With every dust cloud rollin’ in, bringin’ the hard times back again”).

“When They Take Your Truck” (co-written with Douglas Anderson and Westin Davis) crinkles over old age flinging at his head, chronicling a man whose last lot in life is his truck. “He sold it cheap and watched it drive away / Left him standin’ with the license plate / Now how’s that gonna get him down the interstate? / Just another old man runnin’ on an empty tank,” he wields. Dylan’s gravelly murmuring tears the melody in two, much like the the guitar’s inescapable quake, and you begin to really feel the man’s sorrow.

“Color Blind,” a Victoria Banks co-write repurposed from 2015, strikes a poignant chord here, in much the same fashion as Jason Isbell’s “White Man’s World.” He meditates on the state of the world, not only as a private conversation with himself but his family and the world, “Yeah we keep fightin’ fights we ain’t gonna win / People live and die by the color of their skin / I wonder if it wouldn’t be so different / If that was all just gone.” The message rings clearer on the second verse, “We said that we’d do better than our parents did / And we wouldn’t make the same mistakes with our own kids / But here we are just playin’ out the same old shit / I guess the problem’s us.”

The most captivating aspect of Baseball on the Moon is Dylan’s willingness to address things that matter. The set closes on “Honest Work,” co-written with Anderson, a tale about an immigrant woman named Marlena, who is just seeking a better life for herself and comes to the states, illegally. “She dreams of home and all her family / She knew her leavin’ didn’t make ’em happy / But she had to go, she’s all on her own,” he sings, sketching a story of empathy. “She cleans your house and she tends your children / And helps you with the life you’re livin’ / At half the price, well ain’t that nice?” He then flips the script to go back further in our history, driving home this country’s deep pedigree of and dependence on immigrants, singing, “And if you think she don’t belong here / Take a long look in your mirror / We’re both the same, that girl’s got a name / Tell me where your grandpa come from / Chances are he was lookin’ for some / Honest work, what did it hurt?”

Where 2016’s Heart of a Flatland Boy leaves off, Baseball on the Moon pushes the pedal to the metal. His band of players ⎯⎯ including Rob McNelly, Lee Hendricks, Fred Eltringham, Andrew Deroberts, Russ Pahl and Chris Luebeck ⎯⎯ do their due diligence in allowing the songs to breathe or bust the speakers, whichever each moment requires. Dylan has come fully into his own as one of today’s most talented singer-songwriters, and it’s refreshing to see him continue to challenge the establishment, thematically, at least, with conversations many in mainstream country see as taboo topics. It’s risky, but Dylan is just bold and brave enough to talk about things we really need to be talking about.

Grade: 4.5 out 5