Tom Russell In the Heart of the Folk Hotel

Russell is a compelling storyteller, and one of his greatest strengths is the way he puts his own experiences into songs you initially think are about something else.

It would be easy to say that Tom Russell’s album Folk Hotel (Frontera Records) is a tribute to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the ’60s, and let it go at that, except this album is like a summoning of the spirit of the ghosts of that period and equally important the feel, musically and lyrically. It is not the kind of album where one track sticks out above the others because all the songs and the playing are on an high equal level. Each song could be considered a room in that hotel, and in those rooms are side trips to the Southwest, Wales, Belfast and Copenhagen that could be dreams, but maybe not.