Delbert McClinton: Cost Of Living : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Thank heaven for gracefully aging Texans: In the artwork for Cost of Living, Delbert McClinton unapologetically displays his age -- sixty-five come November -- for all to see on his old driver's licenses, pictured on the CD sleeve. But what makes McClinton a rootsy national treasure isn't how long he's stuck around (he taught John Lennon how to play harmonica in 1962) -- it's how much life the man pours into his every note. Cost of Living -- which McClinton produced with Gary Nicholson -- is another strong set of lived-in originals that McClinton wrote or co-wrote, along with an outstanding cover of Jimmy Reed's "I'll Change My Mind." Among the standouts here are the deeply soulful "Your Memory, Me and the Blues," penned with Jim Weatherly, and "The Part I Like Best," a stirring collaboration with Glen Clark, who was McClinton's musical partner back in the Seventies (as Delbert and Glen). Like his one-time duet partner Bonnie Raitt, McClinton has turned a profound love of the blues into sheer mastery. The Social Security years have rarely sounded so good.