Leo Kottke: Try And Stop Me : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As the title would suggest, Leo Kottke's Try And Stop Me is a confident statement from the almost sixty-year-old finger-picking extraordinaire. On the heels of his acclaimed 2002 collaboration with Phish bassist Mike Gordon, Clone, Kottke assembles here another package of mesmerizing guitar work. Stop Me incorporates a tapestry of styles that has come to portray his thirty-five-year career, ranging from exploratory classical emulsions ("Monopoly" and "Mockingbird Hill") to his trademark folk/blues picking gallops ("Bristol Sloth" and "Stolen"). Kottke veers toward a kind of warped jazz with "Jesus Maria," and the record closes with a Los Lobos-featured country stomp, "The Banks of Marble," a tune written in the late Forties (recorded by both the Weavers and Pete Seeger) by a Northeastern farmer, which introduced Kottke to the wonders of the twelve-string guitar.