Jimmie Dale Gilmore: One Endless Night : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Jimmie Dale Gilmore's sixth solo album is mostly a collection of covers, with tunes ranging from Butch Hancock's "Ramblin' Man" to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's "Ripple" to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Mack the Knife." Despite that fact, One Endless Night has a stupefying unity: With his quivering authority, Gilmore sings each song as though he dreamed it up himself. It's as if the hippie physics of Jesse Winchester's "Defying Gravity" and the natural poetics of Hancock's "Down by the Banks of the Guadalupe" sprang from the same undisturbed source. Gilmore the songwriter shows up twice (not including a bonus track). The first time is on his and David Hammond's deliberate honky-tonk title ballad, which Gilmore unwinds with patience. The second time is on "Blue Shadows," a quasi-Hawaiian remembrance of things past written with Hal Ketchum. It all adds up to a first-rate Gilmore collection, full of enchanted cognition, major emotions and pure Texas dust. (RS 835)

JAMES HUNTER