Memories and Moments

Thirteen years after Real Time and just a year after the well-received live album We’re Usually a Lot Better Than This, Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott return with a solid country-bluegrass studio album loaded with intelligently chosen covers and five quality original tunes. These two country boys are in demand: the West Virginia–bred O’Brien performed in Mark Knopfler’s group, while Scott, from Kentucky, played in Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Here they handle a multitude of acoustic instruments and harmonize like hot dogs and beans. Recorded in just three days, the album is well-played and alive with an immediacy that’s impossible to fake. John Prine himself sings his classic “Paradise” about the perils of strip-mining; it works nicely with O’Brien and Scott’s environmentally concerned original “Keep Your Dirty Lights On.” Stellar country classics—George Jones’ “Just One More,” Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken”—show that the duo know the right songs to cover.