Where This River Goes

It's a sound that turns up early and often thereafter on the title track of Wyatt Easterling's second album, Where This River Goes. It might be called the James Taylor Memorial Guitar Lick, a characteristic fingerpicked turnaround figure that appears in many Taylor songs and practically all of his better known ones. Taylor can no more copyright his lick than Bo Diddley could his beat, but it's impossible to hear it without thinking of him. Maybe Easterling, who, like Taylor, used to live in Chapel Hill, NC, comes by it honestly, but that doesn't help it sound any more original. Nor does Easterling's calm, reedy voice, which also sounds like Taylor's, if with a bit more of a drawl and maybe a touch more butterscotch. Then, too, Easterling is singing gently of the travails of love and life, and employing a homespun philosophy to do so, and that's reminiscent of Taylor, too. Easterling's debut album, Both Sides of the Shore, appeared on Moonlight/Warner Bros. in 1981, and he has spent the decades since in Nashville doing at least as much song picking as a music executive as he has songwriting, though he's built a nice little catalog that includes the title songs of the hit albums Life's So Funny (by Joe Diffie) and Modern Day Drifter (by Dierks Bentley), both of which he includes here. He certainly isn't dependent on this album to make a living, but it may serve as a glorified songwriting demo to place more of his work on discs by more prominent country artists. In the meantime, if you love James Taylor, you'll like Wyatt Easterling.