Billy Joe Shaver: The Earth Rolls On : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Earth Rolls On is an album framed by loss. Texas "outlaw" singer-songwriter Billy Joe Shaver and his guitarist son Eddy recorded the album - their sixth together under the band name Shaver - shortly after the deaths of both of their mothers. Then, on December 31st, 2000, not long after the album's completion, Eddy Shaver died of a drug overdose.

But it's not all the dying that marks The Earth Rolls On as Shaver's most powerfully moving work - it's the living. In his three decades of writing and recording, Billy Joe has never sounded as charged with life as he does on the buoyant opening track. "Love is so sweet/It makes you bounce when you walk down the street," he sings to a tune that will make you do the same. Much of that charge comes from Eddy, a gifted guitarist often compared to Stevie Ray Vaughan but with a discipline and tone closer to Eric Clapton. When Billy Joe first recorded "Evergreen Fields" twenty-five years ago, it was a world-weary funeral march. Reprised here, the lyrics remain weighted by mortality ("My seasons are numbered by three"), but there's a carpe diem urgency in the delivery, climaxing in a guitar coda that sounds like the Resurrection set to Cream's "Badge." That's the spirit that moves The Earth Rolls On; it's the sound of two men fighting off the darkness to their last breath. Even in the aftermath, with only one of them left standing, it still sounds like a cry of victory. (RS 868 -- May 10, 2001)

RICHARD SKANSE