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Twenty years ago, Michael Reynolds was lead vocalist/songwriter for the acclaimed alt-country band Pinmonkey. Ten years ago, he quit the business.
But while he may have stepped away from his music career, Michael Reynolds never quit writing songs. Now nearly a decade later, his Blue Élan Records debut album Tarnished Nickel Sky marks the wholly unexpected and altogether triumphant return of a genuine country original.
The eleven self-penned tracks capture Reynolds’ gifts for evoking wandering spirits, dirt road epiphanies and finite lives poised on the threshold of forever. Five-time Grammy-winning producer Ray Kennedy (Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Chris Knight and Rodney Crowell) recounts “an effortless poetry that felt literary. His voice is the most evocative tenor since Vince Gill and it really pulls you in. With each song he sang, I knew exactly what the album needed to be.”
In the album’s opener "Three Days," the narrator wears ‘a halo forged of dust’ as he goes in search of rootless redemption. "Where The Crossroads Meet" summons small town choices of solitude and regret, while the protagonist of "Take Me Down" recounts a soulful spiral of dark secrets. Reynolds infuses the chilling "Can’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan" with an apocalyptic bluegrass fervor. The romancer of "26 Horses" searches for an exit but simultaneously proffers grandiose hope for what’s to come. "Fades" speaks to leaving Nashville behind and the years of memories that fall away and "Southern Boy" is a clear-eyed declaration of country pride, free of pretense or irony. The trucker of "Two Hours From Jackson" long-hauls for the power of love, the rail worker in "So Many Trains" puts his faith in tracks that lead nowhere, and "The Whiskey Goes Down Easy" depicts a life coming apart one drink at a time. The album’s closer "Sweet Blossom" fuses love and loss for an elegy that is simultaneously heartbreaking and life-affirming. “I've always been more inclined to evoke a mood rather than tell a story,” Reynolds says. “Some of these songs just flowed out of me, others took years of revisiting. With all of them, I just followed where they led me. I hope they’re heard that same way.”
For Michael Reynolds, Tarnished Nickel Sky is the unexpected next chapter in a story that continues to surprise the music industry, country audiences and, perhaps most of all, the performer himself. “Twenty years is a lifetime ago,” Reynolds says. “I think about all the time I’d spent haunting Music Row trying to accomplish something. I’d listen to what was popular, and every trend that came along felt like chains that held me down. Letting go of any expectations, whether it was from Nashville or myself, was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done. Maybe that’s why the experience of writing and recording this album feels new again. I can point to Tarnished Nickel Sky with pride and say, ‘This is who I am.’”
