Written by: Dave Cantrell

They’re almost legendary, these guys, and one suspects it’s that proximity that best suits them. Last thing personal pop of this sort needs is the anvil-shaped shadow of heartless fame hanging over its head, with all its capricious demands and idiosyncrasy-killing ways. I’m sure that, should they actually have accountants they might be heard demurring strenuously in the background but that noise should be ignored and with some force. Nope, Chandler Travis and David Greenberger, I’d posit, are just famous enough to make it work, a statement borne out by both the existence of this 19-track anthology and the twenty-plus year recorded legacy it represents.

That legacy, the product of Duplex Planet creator and former Men & Volts bassist Greenberger and then-Incredible Casual Travis befriending each other in 1980 and deciding, ultimately, that David’s words and Chandler’s music would also do well to buddy up, has since been built across at least eight albums, all helmed by Travis under various monikers (The Chandler Travis Three-O, The Catbirds, Rabbit Rabbit et al) as well as solo efforts. Gathered here in warm reunion, this selection, while welcoming seven previously unreleased members to the canon and one that’s undergone an extreme makeover, glows at every corner. The record’s title may be a bit cumbersome but it couldn’t be more accurate, especially that ‘comfortable’ bit. Bocce & Bourbon covers the duo’s almost accidental partnership like a well-worn, lovingly-tattered heirloom quilt, if one with a few strategically placed burrs in it.

Mostly residing in the spryly intimate, half acoustic, half electrified folk rock idiom with the occasional detour – “Typos”‘ new-wave pop and stutter, the Replacements-get-tight-shocker of “She Laughed” (Johnny Spampinato on guitar), the N’Awlinish rhumbalumba of “Graciously” that swings like a drunken derelict’s you-know-what, the pretty much balls-out full band rocker “The Crutch of Music” that could trounce a truckstop bar band – the pair’s take on the form is at once literate, wry, craftily diverse and endowed with a casual authority you know doesn’t come easily even as they make it seem so. Nearly every track, in one way or another, is the epitome of that expert troubadour’s blend, but perhaps the epitome’s epitome is “Baby Come Get Your Cat,” a post-domestic bliss workout with a swamp-pop feel like Tony Joe White discovering urban romantic irony in a now eerily empty apartment, the tongue in the cheek due less to any sense of facetiousness than to it having little else to to but bemoan the predicament while trying to capture the all-that’s-left abandoned kitten. Like the most effective songcraft, there are two (three, four…) sides to every story, to every lyric.

There’s the sunny but doleful “Make the Small Things Pretty” with its breathy string bass (John Clark, who with Dinty Child is a prominent presence across the tracklisting), sighing background vocals and flitting recorder making a, well, comfortable bed for an otherwise emotionally delicate portrait; the crashing intimacy of “Take Me With You,” an Incredible Casuals track from 1995’s It Is Balloon and the earliest cut here that lays a heavy ruminative vibe atop its aspirational tone, its narrator hoping to escape his dream house before it falls down around him; “January,” a devotional love song with its sun low in the sky, the spacious, slow-walking bass, plinky piano loveliness and a winter breeze of clarinet (Berke McKelvey) lending it a Woody Allenized melancholy. That hint of wistfulness obtains not surprisingly on both of the collection’s ‘home’-centered songs. “Calling Me Back Home,” affecting with a semi-mournful, semi-grateful twinkle, suggests something of a midwest Jackson Browne, exhibiting a similarly introspective-but-universal tapestry if a bit more closely knit, while “This Is Home” is the more exuberant of the two even as its three-horn intro patch carries something of the Irish wake in its, umm, wake, a stately, slightly besotted sway that’s soon adopted by Child’s accordion.

All that said, it may be those seven “previously unissued” selections that most impress. When you’ve got tracks like the gut-punchy opener “Air, Running Backwards” that could tweak envy in John Hiatt and Elvis Costello, the cheeky melodic pop-punk of “I Bit the Hand that Fed Myself” that suggests Andy Partridge revisit the idea of working with Todd Rundgren again, one called “By the Way” that belongs on the hippest jukebox in the land circa 1985, or, especially, a wonderfully post-quixotic piece of aw-shucks hero pop like “The Strongman of North America,” a twisted slice of cornbelt realism and down home whimsy that among its many merits manages to slot itself, for a moment, into that long tradition of charming, soft-spoken tales a la the Minutemen’s “History Lesson pt. II” that you haven’t even released yet, you’ve clearly got this songwriting lark down and should by all rights, lefts, and in-betweens be able to put your feet up on the porch rail and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But hell, life just ain’t fair, a sentiment which, coincidentally (or not), many of the characters speaking in these songs would agree with, sage nods of the head and despite-it-all smiles all around.

Softly driven here, precisely unshackled there, busting with an astute sense of observation everywhere, Bocce & Bourbon is humane as hell and funner than even that. A timeless collection, in fact, and possibly, just maybe, legendary.