Tommy Womack

DADDY
For a Second Time (CEDAR CREEK)
DADDY played an Americana Music Association showcase, semiacoustic, and blew the house away. Session guitarist Will Kimbrough has long played as an acoustic duo with singer/songwriter Tommy Womack, whose tunes have been recorded by Jimmy Buffett and Little Feat (“Champion of the World”), but this CD brings in three A-list sidemen, and it rocks. Juke-joint-appropriate and swampy, very little sticky sentimentality creeps into these tunes, even in an ode to Martin Luther King and a bluesy, halfhearted plea for sobriety. The commencement
speech none of us ever heard, advises graduates, “The real world’s coming on the midnight train…[so]…early to bed, early to rise, work like a dog, and advertise,” among other harsh realities. The musicianship on this mostly-electric album is casually superb throughout. The last cut, a very specific tale of murder and redemption, is sung solo, accompanied by acoustic guitar and an achingly lonely harp. It rings chillingly true, as does the rest of this fine album.
—SUZANNE CADGENE - Elmore Magazine - Jan. 2010

With their roots firmly planted on the funkier side of the country music mountain, DADDY—led by esteemed veterans of twang Will Kimbrough and Tommy Womack—steps out from the dark corner of a sweaty, beer-soaked juke joint to offer a sonic brew mixed from equal parts Stones, Shaver and Silverstein. On this, their first studio effort following 2005’s live album At the Women’s Club, the talented duo, backed by Nashville session aces John Deaderick, Dave Jacques and Paul Griffith, proves that they know their way around the swampy back roads of the American South as well as they do the concrete streets of the Tennessee city they call home.

For A Second Time is as literate as it is lively—an intelligent romp through knee-high weeds that grow just as easily in a deserted Nashville lot as they do an untouched Mississippi field. “Nobody From Nowhere” kicks the album off in fitting style. Though it may take the lonesome traveler all day to reach DADDY’s one-light town, their eagerness to give a friendly wave hello is all the convincing needed to stick around and lend an ear.

It’s this kind of warm welcome that makes For A Second Time an enjoyable listen. “The Ballad of Martin Luther King” is a romping update and timely reminder of the message behind the folky Mike Millius original; “Redemption Is a Mother’s Only Son,” the bookend for the 10 tunes, stands as the most gentle and heartbreaking of the set, bringing the album to its full sunup to sundown rotation.

While DADDY may be a side project for soloists Kimbrough and Womack, For A Second Time stands as a testament to tone and tome, and also proves that the two friends definitely know how to raise a fine—and delightfully irreverent—album together.

Written by Drew Kennedy - BMI Music World

“DADDY (Will Kimbrough & Tommy Womack) is Americana at its roots-rockingest best - honest music that makes its case with equal parts chops and smiles." - Los Angeles Daily News - by Billy Altman

“He is undoubtedly one of the best interviews I have ever had on the show.” - Reg’s Coffeehouse Syndicated Radio Show

“…I’m always up for Womack’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge sense of humor. His
voice drips with irony on CD, and live, he’s like a damn Greek play.” - Folk & Country Magazine

Former Government Cheese honcho, world-renowned author of The Cheese Chronicles and solo artist, Tommy Womack is Tom Lehrer* with a Telecaster. What else would you call a guy who hides the song “I’m Selling Mom’s Urine on eBay” at the end of this, his third solo record? Well, how about literate and intelligent? Songs such as “Tough” and “We Can’t Do This Anymore” steer clear of the yucks, and are smart, sassy and heartfelt without being cloyingly cute. Womack captures mood like an emotional Polaroid on such songs as “You Could Be at the Beach Right Now, Little Girl” or the title cut. His sidemen, who include Bill Lloyd, Will Kimbrough, Ken McMahan and Lisa Oliver Gray on lovely vocals give the record a “two beers down, roll tape” sorta feel, well captured by co-producer David Henry and Womack. Womack’s homage to The Replacements, with its somber violins and cellos is subtle and moving, and the lines “Paul is in the basement, writing ballads, drinking O’Douls/Bob is up in Heaven, shooting speed and smoking Kools” probably sums up the current state of ‘Mats affairs as well as can be done. This record is more sedate in points than some of his past work, but suffers not a bit for it. Every Tommy Womack record has moments of “you gotta hear this” on it, and Circus Town is no exception.

* Tom Lehrer is a musical satirist who grew to fame in the 1960s, penning such songs as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.” Never heard of him? Ask your parents.

Tommy Womack: http://www.tommywomack.com
James Mann - Ink 19 Magazine

Country/Roots

Tommy Womack
There, I Said It!
(Cedar Creek/Thirty Tigers ****)

It could have been a mopey mess. Tommy Womack’s first album in four years deals with his nervous breakdown, his return to the daily work grind with the realization he will never be a rock star, and the responsibilities of being a husband and father.

Yet, while exploring those themes, the 44-year-old singer and songwriter has come up with the best work of his career. Like his pal and fellow Nashvillian Todd Snider, Womack leavens searing emotional honesty with observational wit and wry wise-guy charm as he moves among rock, country and blues. The result, for the former leader of the groups Government Cheese and the Bis-quits, is a bittersweet, often hilarious portrait of a struggle for survival that skirts self-pity and is warts-and-all real. It also has a happy ending - for now - that feels earned. Or, as Womack puts it jauntily just before the un-ironic finale of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses Again” - “I’m a cockroach after the bomb, carrying on.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Phladelphia, PA - by Nick Cristiano

Middle-life crises don’t come any bigger than Tommy Womack’s back in 2003. The former Bis-Quits/Government Cheese guitarist enjoyed a middling Americana solo career (great albums, little acclaim) when he mistook his dwindling opportunities for the end of his gig. To compound matters, Womack’s wife lost her job which necessitated his return to the full-time workforce, which he coped with by “eating Xanax like Skittles,” and praying to God for the songs to come. In that context, There, I Said It!, Womack’s first new album in five years, is an answer to two prayers — the one from Womack and the one from his fans. There, I Said It! is Womack’s most personal album to date, overflowing with his close-to-the-bone observations about the responsibilities of life and family and the futility of a music career on the fringe. “A Songwriter’s Prayer” documents Womack’s plea for inspiration, while the loping, edgy Blues grind of “Too Much Month at the End of the Xanax” and the Country/Folk strum of “I’m Never Gonna Be a Rock Star” fairly speak for themselves. Meanwhile, John Prine and Arlo Guthrie are arm wrestling for the right to claim inspiration for “I Want a Cigarette” as Womack peels off some chicken wire roadhouse riffs and vents his workaday spleen on “Fluorescent Light Blues” and “A Cockroach After the Bomb” and does some strolling, talking-Folk magic on “Alpha Male and the Mystery Blood.” The past couple of years have been kinder to Womack; he’s played hired gun guitar for Todd Snider, started a band called Daddy with old friend/collaborator Will Kimbrough and toured England where he found a rich vein of unexpected adoration. For all of his terrific solo albums, his fantastic book about life in a band, and his beautiful loser outlook, he ought to be getting that love at home. No, he’s never gonna be a Rock star … guess he’ll have to settle for being brilliant and loved by a rabid and really intelligent few. (Brian Baker) Grade: A - CityBeat - Cincinnati, OH

At the center of Tommy Womack’s new album, There, I Said It!, is a seven-minute, conscience-spilling rant, “Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood.” It depicts a man in his early 40s at home with his wife and young son, drinking his way through a six-pack and contemplating a handmade poster he saw stapled to a telephone pole.

The handbill advertised a show that night by Death Cab for Cutie and a second band whose name Womack made up, which serves as the song’s title. The guy can’t get the group’s name out of his head, and it sparks some wide-ranging thoughts. With an acoustic guitar and electric bass pressing a relentlessly driving rhythm behind Womack’s words, he remembers a time two decades earlier, when an intriguing band name would have been enough to get him to pay the cover charge and join the crowd at the front of the club’s stage—“just because I’m 25, and every day is a stone summer day,” Womack speak-sings.

That memory prods the singer to remember his bygone days: he too played in a rock ’n’ roll band once. His group always had work, his manager always had pot, and he “got laid quite a lot,” Womack sings.

The song’s narration pauses, and the drums and electric guitars kick in. Then the commentary flies forward, the lyrics taking one randomly hilarious turn after another. First, Womack takes on the music industry (“I bet their name was Menstrual Blood,” he says of the Alpha Males, “and the A&R guy said, ‘That’s no good. Make it Mystery, and we can target a broader-based, goth, dog-lover market.’ ”), then switches to his young son, his father and Jesus.

By song’s end, Womack acknowledges that he’s just a burned-out, balding, 40-ish fellow who saw a rock poster at 8:15 in the morning while walking to a crappy, $11-an-hour job. He once thought rock ’n’ roll would save his life and make him wealthy, loved and constantly entertained. Instead, he’s riddled with anxieties and burdened by responsibilities.

He secretly vomits in the toilet at work from his nerves, and the highlight of his day comes when he sneaks out of the office for a cigarette. To keep going, he thinks of the love of his family, yet he can’t help but imagine his son—who received a drum set for Christmas—living out the same dream that failed him. He envisions his son traveling the country in a rock band, “doing things only young people do, banging on the skins at Bonnaroo, rocking the dread heads dancing in the mud, before Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood. God go with him. Amen.”

Indeed, this is Tommy Womack’s story—a longtime Nashville rocker who struggles with anxiety and to make ends meet while raising an 8-year-old son, Nathan, with his wife, former morning TV anchor Beth Tucker.

It’s also the story of thousands of other musicians who arrive in Nashville with a dream, most of whom never get a foot in the door and eventually give up. Others, like Womack, taste success, selling some records, drawing nightclub crowds and getting in a van to stump for the cause, only to wind up in their 40s with few other skills and no backup plan.

But Womack is a songwriter—one with more talent and nerve than most. In There, I Said It!, he tells his story in the most personal songs he’s ever written. Though the album is just now coming out—it hit the streets on Feb. 20—it has already, in advance, drawn Womack more airplay, more enthusiastic reviews and more concert bookings than any previous effort.

In other words, an album about how he failed in the pursuit of his dreams may give him the career he’s always sought. No one sees the irony more clearly than Tommy Womack.

There, I Said It! began when Womack hit bottom. In March 2003, five months after his 40th birthday, he walked through his home with clothes piled on both forearms. He looked down and couldn’t remember which pile was clean and which was dirty.

“All of a sudden I just threw all the clothes down, and I fell on the floor crying,” says Womack. “I called Beth at work lying in the fetal position and screaming, ‘I’m a failure!’ I’d been trying real hard for real long, and I wasn’t going to make it, and everybody knew it. I had a nervous breakdown, basically.”

Womack recalls the event one afternoon while sitting in a midtown Japanese restaurant. He’s as skinny as a wired teenager, his beard thick and untrimmed, his hair long and hanging over his glasses. But his eyes are bright and focused, his smile quick and regular, and his words clear and brave.

That dreadful morning, his wife rushed home from work and called a doctor, who saw Womack that day. “For months, I had crying fits and panic attacks,” he says. “Everything fell apart. I had to bag a whole string of gigs. I lost my booking agent. At my temp job at Vandy, I was making myself as useless as possible. I got my duties down to getting the mail and covering phones for the receptionist during her lunch shift. But I managed to get fired. You can’t have a receptionist at the front desk crying all the time. It disturbs people.”

Womack started seeing a therapist and taking Xanax. After several months of counseling, his doctor suggested hospitalization. Womack protested, but the doctor told him he was as depressed as any patient she’d ever treated.

“I spent one night in a mental ward,” Womack says. “I’d never been locked up in a room for any reason. I couldn’t sleep at all. It was exactly like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I hope to never go through that experience again.”

In August 2003, while watching his son swim at the YMCA, he noticed a voice mail on his cell phone. His wife had left a message asking him to call her immediately. She waited until he called to tell him she’d been let go from her job as spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Safety.

Later the same day, his phone rang again. It was the Vanderbilt job placement service telling him there was a job opening in the political science department. “I got the job because the other two people didn’t show up for their interviews,” he says with a wry smile. “God knows I’m sure they wished someone else had. I was a flaky, 40-year-old pothead musician who hadn’t ever grown up. But I had to take the job. In one afternoon we went from Beth being the breadwinner, which she’s always been, to me being the one who had to take care of things.”

The job didn’t start well. “I was paired up with a lady my age who was a single mom and had worked hard just to get to her position,” Womack says. “I represented everything she would have every right in the world to resent. I offended her more easily than I’d offended anybody in my life.”

His co-worker made her displeasure clear, and Womack, in his fragile state, experienced anxiety attacks every day knowing he’d have to face her. “I was throwing up on the way to work and in the john at work,” he says. “It was absolute hell.”

Obviously, his depression didn’t help matters. “I thought I’d screwed up every opportunity I’d ever had,” he says. “If anybody has not been screwed over by the music industry, it’s me. I’ve had chance after chance, one at-bat after another. Nobody ever twisted my arm and made me get drunk before going onstage. No one made me do a show stoned. No one made me run at the mouth at the microphone not knowing what my point was. And, in the long run, I never gave the music industry a song it could use. Commercial is not a bad thing. The Sermon on the Mount is commercial. But what did I do? I gave the machine an eight-minute-long song about The Replacements.”

He stops, looking dead-on as his interviewer laughs. Womack just shakes his head. “Nobody ever screwed me out of anything,” he says. “I’d screwed up every opportunity I had. I felt it was over. I was toast. Those were the worst months of my life.”

Womack grew up a preacher’s son in Kentucky. He first gained notice as co-leader of Government Cheese, an ’80s garage-rock band with a well-regarded live show based on witty, left-field songs like “Camping on Acid,” “Mammaw Drives the Bus,” “A Little Bit of Sex” and a searing cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.”

They appeared on MTV in 1988, and for several years, seemed a breath away from a bigger break. Womack later wrote a colorful book about the band’s experiences, and about growing up a rock fan in rural Kentucky—the hilarious Cheese Chronicles: The Story of a Rock ’n’ Roll Band You’ve Never Heard Of.

By the time his book came out, Womack had teamed with friends Will Kimbrough, Mike Grimes and Tommy Meyer in the Bis-quits, a roots-rockin’ quartet named in part because all of the band members had considered leaving the music business before joining forces. They recorded one album for John Prine’s Oh Boy! Records in 1994.

“I’ve always thought it was Tommy’s job to write songs about things that don’t make sense,” says Kimbrough, who’s also gone on to release several solo albums between tours as the guitarist for Rodney Crowell and Jimmy Buffett, both of whom have recorded his tunes. “That’s always been what he does, only now he’s older, so the idea of what doesn’t make sense has changed. I’m blown away by these new songs, but I always expect Tommy’s songs to be brilliant. He’s like a hillbilly Woody Allen, and this album is a rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the film Little Miss Sunshine. It says, ‘This is a world of shit, but it’s all we’ve got.’ ”

In 1997, Womack started releasing solo rock albums featuring top-notch players like guitarists George Bradfute and Kimbrough, drummers Paul Griffith and Fenner Castner, bassists Dave Jacques, Brad Jones and Paul Slivka, steel guitarist Al Perkins and keyboardist Ross Rice. All four of his albums drew good reviews and “sold in the low thousands,” as he puts it. The last of these albums, a live recording from the XM Radio studios in Washington, D.C., was released a week before Womack’s nervous breakdown in March 2003.

In September 2003, a month after he’d started his second stint at Vanderbilt University, Womack got a call from singer-songwriter Todd Snider, who asked if he wanted to play bass in the aptly named Nervous Wrecks, Snider’s band. “Tommy was a wreck long before he met me,” cracks Snider, who says he thinks the devil bet God that if Womack took a day job, he’d quit music altogether.

“I first heard of Tommy through the Bis-quits, and I just loved his songs,” Snider continues. “You could tie ropes to his hands and feet and pull him apart with pick-up trucks, and a bunch of songs nobody else could’ve written will fall out.”

Womack jumped at Snider’s offer, and fortunately, his new Vanderbilt boss allowed him time off to make the shows. “I didn’t own a bass, I’d never played one professionally, and I said yes immediately,” he recalls. He learned 29 songs in a matter of days and played his first bass gig in front of a crowd of 1,000.

Womack wasn’t yet emotionally healthy. “I’d cry in the dressing room when nobody was there,” he says. In a Seattle airport, he had a second breakdown, ripping at his clothes and gnashing his teeth in front of his bandmates and other travelers.

But he kept the gig, playing with Snider and the Nervous Wrecks for more than two years. In November 2004, after blacking out through an entire gig, he quit drinking, and for the first time in his adult life, he no longer knows the phone number of a pot dealer. He also got to where he could sit through a movie all the way through without pausing a DVD or walking out into the lobby of a theater. He took that as a sign he was getting himself under control again.

Meanwhile, Kimbrough and Womack began doing duo gigs on the side, which led them to form another part-time side band that the two fathers called Daddy, with Griffith on drums, Jacques on bass and John Deaderick on keyboards. They recorded a series of live shows in Frankfort, Ky., and released them in 2005 as Daddy Live at the Women’s Club.

“All of a sudden, Will’s career was on the rise, and Todd was coming back up fast, and the spotlight on them bounced some light on me,” Womack explains. “I started getting my own gigs again. My music career came to life again without me doing a thing to solicit it. Before long, I was working every weekend and often during the week, with no booking agent. It was all coming to me.”

The first of the new songs that make up There, I Said It! came on Snider’s tour bus in Texas in the spring of 2006. “Nice Day” is a wistful, atypically sweet song for Womack about an afternoon spent at a friend’s house swimming in a backyard pool with his wife and son.

“I didn’t realize how good it was at first,” he says of the song. “I thought it was a navel-gazing, mealy-mouth confession of a wimp. It took me a while to absorb it because it came from this honest place I’d never written from before. From then on, the spigot was open. All the lyrics started coming from that same honest place.”

Womack asked Deaderick, who’s played in touring bands for the Dixie Chicks and Patty Griffin, if he would consider recording the new songs in his basement studio. “I’d never heard any of the songs until Tommy came to the house,” Deaderick says. “I wasn’t aware of the problems he’d been through, but listening to his lyrics, I put it all together. The songs just completely knocked me out. I jumped at the chance to make the record.”

With Deaderick as producer, Womack enlisted friends who played for free, including Kimbrough on guitar, Slivka on bass, Castner on drums and Lisa Gray on harmony vocals. Former Black Crowes member Audley Freed plays guitar on a couple tracks, and John Gardner replaces Castner on drums for two tunes.

The album opens with the somber “A Songwriter’s Prayer,” where Womacks asks God to send him some tunes. What follows includes the self-explanatory “I’m Never Gonna Be a Rock Star” and two songs about his struggles with his day job, “Fluorescent Light Blues” and “Cockroach After the Bomb.” There’s the hard-rocking blues about instability, “Too Much Month at the End of the Xanax,” and another written in his analyst’s office, “I Want a Cigarette.” The album closes with a blessing about how life can get better, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses Again.”

“In a very leftist way, I consider this my first Christian record,” Womack explains while finishing his sushi. “It starts with a prayer and ends with an answer. Of course, I question the resurrection on track nine, so for a Christian record, it’s pretty edgy. If they have a Dove Award for most blasphemous record by a male artist, I’d be a shoe-in.”

The day of his Scene interview, it turns out, was his last as a full-time employee at Vanderbilt. He moves from a full-time office worker who does music on the side to a full-time musician who does part-time office work. In other words, he’s rejiggering the dream he first started to live in his 20s with Government Cheese and, in his own way, showing all the other dreamers, especially those with true talent, that there can be another way to become a small but important part of the big machine. He may never be a rock star, but by writing songs no one else could’ve written—songs drawn from his own experiences and own point of view—he may once again be able to support his family. As Womack puts it, all he’s ever wanted to do was earn as much money from his profession as an average-income insurance agent.

“I’ve been crazy all my life,” Womack says while paying his bill. “I was the crazy kid in high school. I was ADHD before anybody knew what it was. But now I’m a crazy guy who’s making a living at it. It’s been a while now since I’ve asked myself, ‘Tommy, why are you doing this?’ It’s because I know the answer now. I write crazy songs, and I perform them. This is what I do.” - Nashville Scene - Feb. 22, 2007

The voice of William Faulkner’s ghost bellows, “Write what you know.” And Womack, author of the woefully neglected memoir Cheese Chronicles: The True Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band You’ve Never Heard Of, complies with the most self-conscious, self-deprecating, spent-too-much-time-in-Nashville disc of self-revelation you’ll ever hear. Fittingly, “I’m Never Gonna Be A Rock Star” segues to a therapist’s office smoke break with a cry of “Where’s my catharsis?” Think Spalding Gray if he’d grown up in Kentucky with a guitar and a vinyl copy of Black and Blue. - The Village Voice - New York, NY

It's convenient, but only somewhat accurate, to compare Tommy Womack to his friends and slightly better-known musical cohorts Todd Snider and Will Kimbrough. The singer/songwriter's fifth solo release comes four years and a nervous breakdown after his last disc, and that sobering experience, along with joining the eight-to-five rat race to make ends meet after assuming his music career was finished, informs the tone and especially the lyrics on this comeback. "I'm 43 now, my hair is going, I've got a shaky sense of self esteem," laments Womack on the folk ballad "Nice Day," and that pretty much sums up this renewed chapter in his career. Thankfully, Womack is too smart, self-deprecating, and witty to wallow in self-pity. His words define and refine a dry humor that balances depression, sometimes literally as in "Too Much Month at the End of the Xanex," and a somewhat shaky belief that life will work out all right. It's a tricky tightrope act, but Womack pulls it off through good to excellent country-folk-rockers and an everyman voice that hits the right emotional notes. Few singer/songwriters could pull off a stream-of-consciousness-styled life story such as "Alpha Male & the Canine Mystery Blood" -- which mixes a post-9/11 world-view, a discussion of weird band names, religion, and his life -- with such casual honesty and unpretentious irony. Credit some of this album's success to producer John Deaderick, who frames these songs with the perfect mixture of bluesy, shambling folk, rock, and country. He keeps the focus on Womack's lyrics while surrounding him with a rootsy Americana that seems effortless. These tunes shimmer with songwriting so sharp, lyrically full, and intelligent that the logical response is to play the album over again to catch what you might have missed before. And each time you learn a little more about Womack as a human being and an artist, to the point that you seem to have read his diary. There aren't many performers who can write music with that kind of integrity while keeping the listener involved -- and even riveted -- in someone else's experiences. Maybe it's because listeners see a bit of themselves in Tommy Womack's reflection. - All Music Guide

The name Tommy might not be the first you think of when you hear the name “Womack,” but all of that is subject to change. After weathering a nervous breakdown, a number of dead-end day jobs and the realization that being a rock star is a young man’s dream, Nashville songwriter Tommy Womack is determined to make himself a star through sheer optimism. On his witty, poignant new album, There, I Said It!, Womack explores the fate of a songwriter struggling to keep his head above the daily grind. “I’m blown away by these new songs,” friend and collaborator Will Kimbrough told the Nashville Scene, “but I always expect Tommy’s songs to be brilliant. He’s like a hillbilly Woody Allen, and this album is a rock and roll equivalent of the film Little Miss Sunshine. It says, ‘This is a world of shit, but it’s all we’ve got.’” - American Songwriter Magazine - By Evan Schlansky

“[Womack is a] Nashville rocker whose best songs are insightful, funny and
penetrating.” - USA Today

Tommy Womack "On & Off the Wagon" -- Tommy Womack is a wordsmith. Pure and simple. Well, actually there is nothing simple about Tommy...pure and complex! How is that? The words manifest in all different kinds of ways. There are songs, some delivered solo, and some with bands current and past; in reverse order with DADDY, The Bis-quits, and Government Cheese. There are books, The Cheese Chronicles, which is in my estimation one of the finest rock and roll books ever written; The Lavender Boys and Elsie, the collected civil war era letters of Albert and Elsie Deveraux which came out in 2008; and now we await an illustrated children's book to be published this year called Jack The Bunny. He has even contributed columns to Music Fog's website from time to time. His blog over on his website is a literate and illuminating glimpse into his life. From it, posted back in May:

"On Tuesday I got my second day of recording done for my next solo venture. John Deaderick and I – the same team who gave you There, I Said It! - are at it again. Expect a 2011 release for this one. (It makes no sense to rush these things anymore, does it.) Songs recorded so far: “On & Off The Wagon,” “Play That Cheap Trick, Cheap Trick Play,” “It Doesn’t Have to Be That God,” “Bye & Bye,” “Wishes Do Come True,” “Pothead Blues,” “I’m Too Old to Feel That Way Right Now,” “Darling Let Your Free Bird Fly,” “Guilty Snake Blues,” and “I Love You to Pieces."

Whoo-hoo! A new Tommy Womack CD is an well anticipated and wholly awesome thing to contemplate!

Tommy came up on the Music Fog bus this past February, at Folk Alliance, and brought Lisa Gray with him to lay down one of the above mentioned new tunes. Is this a song about sobriety, about being on the road, about marital fidelity, about the human condition? Answer, likely all of the above. A lot to stuff in, delivered in just two minutes and thirty-eight seconds! "On and Off the Wagon."

- Jessie Scott - Music Fog - August 30, 2010

"Like Warren Zevon's post-rehab masterpiece 'Sentimental Hygiene', 'There, I Said It!' finds Womack reflecting on his predicament with his sense of humor intact and, for the most part, glad to be alive."

CLICK LINK TO READ ENTIRE STORY - Dave Lifton, BlogCritics.com

Who is Tommy Womack? He's a "songwriter, author, creator of taut sensual tension," as well as frequent Music Fog contributor. He's media savvy and camera-ready, as we saw when he spooked Ben in Nashville last fall.

In Memphis, he kicked it up a notch, with "Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood," a tour-de-force that's part personal saga and part historical epic. Jessie Scott says that "Alpha Male..." became an XM listener favorite on X Country when it was released in 2007, and it's clear why. Packed with lines and phrases that beg to be carved on desks, notebooks, and bathroom stalls across the country, it's sort a of world-weary, post-modern, "American Pie." Tommy says that he wrote the song in a bar, in 20 minutes, on a roll of paper from a cash register, and that it's got "1127 words, not counting adjectives."

Music doesn't get much more indie than this, so it's also the perfect song to kick off our trip to SXSW 2010. All hail the gospel according to Tommy. Be sure to spread the word and share it with your friends. For even more of the good word, check out his site and YouTube channel.

-- Chris - Music Fog - March 15, 2010