Try Me One More Time

A musician has to earn the right to play the blues as simply as David Bromberg does on Try Me One More Time, which is perhaps why the esteemed singer/songwriter waited 18 years to make this album. Like his compatriot Bob Dylan, Bromberg is now a wizened old man not dissimilar to the blues players he'd wanted to imitate as a hungry young musician. Because he's accrued so much in terms of life experience, his music requires much less flash. Even Bromberg’s guitar work—so renowned for its virtuosic qualities—here feels relaxed and at times even slightly frayed, which just goes to show that Bromberg no longer feels he has anything to prove. Instead, Try Me One More Time is about atmosphere and feeling. He plays these songs as if from memory in a single sitting, and they feel like the still image that the dust cloud of his life has left behind. The essence of his playing is its unhurriedness, which is heard to great effect on an unusually languorous cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”