Boz Scaggs: Come On Home : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

You gotta pay your dues to sing the blues, goes the old cliché. But if you're Boz Scaggs, you bear your burdens pretty lightly. With his tangy, delicately weary tenor and his flair for slipping authentic R&B textures into breezy adult-contemporary arrangements, this guy could never be accused of the overwrought soulman posturing practiced by fellow yuppie icons Lionel Richie and Michael Bolton. If Scaggs had just been dumped by his wife and were sitting next to you at a bar, he'd be more likely to give you a meaningful shrug than cry into your beer.

On his new album, Come on Home, Scaggs gives props to the musicians and songwriters who influenced him early on, covering songs by T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Reed and others. True to form, Scaggs never tries to outemote the masters; instead he maintains a soft, graceful touch, imbuing this classic material with a winning combination of subtle pathos and understated wit. His version of Walker's "T-Bone Shuffle" is gently playful and lean to a fault. Likewise, Reed's "Found Love" is faithfully presented as taut, driving 12-bar blues; and Earl King Johnson's "It All Went Down the Drain" is served with a piquant, Stax-style horn arrangement and a healthy dash of slide-guitar grit.

Ballads such as the wistful standard "Love Letters" and Scaggs' own "I've Got Your Love" – one of four songs on Home written or co-written by the singer – are rendered with equal elegance. That's not to say that Scaggs never breaks an emotional sweat. Singing the radiant David Porter/Isaac Hayes number "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)," Scaggs achieves a moody intensity that builds to a smoldering peak. It's a pleasure to listen to a veteran artist like Scaggs letting his roots show with such unaffected sincerity.