Boogie of the Week: Sam Bush - Laps in Seven

There aren’t many artists that I actively pursue information on when they’re coming to town, or really anticipate their new album releases. Usually when I’m checking out new releases on iTunes or at Manifest, I just see what comes out and if it seems cool, I check it out. Sam Bush is an exception to that rule. If Sammy’s playing anywhere within an hour of home, I’m there, with my sister/SammyStalker Bonnie in tow. So when we heard most of his new album in his set at Merlefest, I knew that less than 48 hours would pass from my release to acquisition.

So Wednesday, June 14th I manufactured a reason to be on the right side of town to get by Manifest, and sure enough, there sat Laps in Seven, Sam’s newest release on Sugar Hill. Lest you think I was slacking to wait until the say after the disc was released, I did in fact try iTunes on Tuesday, but the album wasn’t available online yet. So I bought it, along with Led Zeppelin II & IV (also unavailable on iTunes, dammit), and slammed it into the CD player in the PT Cruiser, with my Pavlovian slobber starting to puddle up in the floorboards.

This might be his finest studio album ever. Period. I think it does a phenomenal job of crossing the genres, something Sam does so well live. It’s got straight up high-octane bluegrass (Riding that Bluegrass Train, Bringing in the Georgia Mail), great cover songs (Hartford’s On the Road, Darrel Scott’s River Take Me), great original songs like the Emmylou Harris duet The River’s Gonna Run and fantastic instrumental numbers like The Dolphin Dance and New Country.

The bluegrass numbers really show what the addition of Scott Vestal on banjo has done for this band. It’s like the missing piece that finally clicks into place, you never really knew it was missing, but now that it’s in place it completes the whole picture so eloquently you can’t imagine hearing those songs without it. The songs are great, Bush’s vocals are solid, and Emmylou always sounds like an angel, but for me the top two tracks on the album are instrumentals, where these incredible musicians get a chance to stretch their musical legs a little.

New Country with Jean Luc Ponty is a standby of Ponty’s sets, but adding Sam’s great bluegrass band to the mix gives it a hotter energy and more vibrant life than I’ve heard in other versions of the song. The Dolphin Dance is a lighthearted romp that takes me back twenty years, to standing on my cousin’s dock in the Gulf, looking out at the dolphins playing at the sunset danced across the water, while I reeled in supper.

So I start the day as a huge Sam Bush fan, but this album is such a something-for-everyone feast, that I can’t imagine anyone who loves music not finding at least one track on here that they’ll love.