Search - Eddy & Kim Lawrence :: My Second Wife's First Album

''My Second Wife's First Album'' is a return to the acoustic sounds that first brought attention to Eddy Lawrence's music back in the 1980s. It features his distinctive flatpicking and fingerstyle guitar playing as well as his mandolin and resonator guitar work, all backed up by his wife, Kim, on upright bass. Growing up in North Alabama, with deep roots in the red clay of then-rural Walker County, Eddy was immersed in the old-time folk, country, blues, and bluegrass traditions that flourished there. He has desribed the area where he grew up as being ''the place where the Appalachians meet the Delta'', in reference to the musical melting pot that fused traditional European and African elements, spawning the folk, blues, gospel, rock, and soul music that heavily influenced popular music worldwide in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thematically, the album is (in the words of its liner notes) hardly a collection of giddy love songs , even as it explores and celebrates a new life together. Eddy explains, ''Like a lot of folks we know, we found ourselves starting over in middle age, with new partners and a wild combination of joy and trepidation as we left behind a past that no longer worked and set off into an uncharted future. We decided to use our new beginning as a motivation to explore our sometimes difficult and painful pasts and to chart what we hoped would be a better road to the future.'' Some of that painful past included living with family members with addiction issues and coming to terms with the long term negative impacts that can come from sharing one's life with addicted and mentally unstable loved ones. During the time that ''Second Wife's'' was being written and recorded, Eddy's older sister died as a result of her long struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse. Several of the songs on the album were inspired by the memory of her life and her untimely death. Despite the sometimes dark and troubled subject matter, ''My Second Wife's First Album'' maintains an overall hopeful attitude. Many songs on the CD contain the humor that Eddy has become known for. ''Your Mama Loves Me'', for example, takes an amusing look at relations with reluctant new in-laws, while ''Step 8'' lays out a list of all the persons wronged by a recovering addict who is working to make amends. ''Turnpike'' is the tale of a couple of bored humans who entertain themselves by watching their catnip-obsessed feline enjoy his substance of choice.