Leave it to two New York City art school graduates, who grew up listening to AM Manhattan radio, to make an urban ’90s country music album jangle, twang, and sparkle like a pocket full of diamonds.
Fully anchored in gritty working class details of the longshoremen of Hoboken, New Jersey, brothers Bob and Mike Delevante recorded one of the most unexpectedly rooted albums of 1997 with Postcards from Along the Way on Capitol Records, then the label home of Garth Brooks, Trace Adkins and John Berry. The production on this album even went the extra mile to square the stevedore sensibility, and forego the Stetsons, by retaining Jersey Shore native, bassist, and founding member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Garry Tallent, to produce.
Tallent had previously co-produced their 1995 Rounder Records debut album Long About That Time, an album now celebrated as the first number one album on the then-new Gavin Americana charts. Entertainment Weekly described that record as having “big-city toughness with bluegrass twang.” In the liner notes to that debut, Robert K. Oermann said, “There’s piercing harmonica, molten-silver steel guitar, jingle-jangle lead playing, a rhythm section to die for, and enormous energy here. An then there are those lyrics and those vocals.” In a Washington Post review, Geoffrey Himes compared the Delevantes to the BoDeans whose sound he said was “a mesmerizing blend of twangy Everly Brothers-like harmonies, driving Creedencesque country-rock and Springsteenish working-class narratives.”
And that is always the temptation when talking about The Delevantes’ charm, to focus first either on the insanely tight sibling harmonies ,or secondly on the timbre of Bob Delevante’s ear-catching lead vocals. Instead, I want to begin by lingering on all the wonderfully specific details of their songwriting across the twelve songs on their second album.
Postcards from Along the Way is inescapably about a particular place and it just happens to be Hoboken, New Jersey. Other than Lyle Lovett singing about a Jersey girl on “Walk Through the Bottomland” or C. W. McCall singing about a convoy of truckers making a strip for the Jersey Shore, The Garden State does not typically factor into many country songs as destination, departure point, or backdrop other than knowing Camden, New Jersey was where Jimmie Rodgers recorded for Victor Records in the 1920s.
In 1997, every cultural and geographic reference on this record runs contrary to the going mainstream Nashville narrative. The Delevantes lyrics don’t play to script. Experiences often associated with the rural south and southwest are instead filtered through a core Mid-Atlantic reality.
When The Delevantes write and sing about a river it isn’t the Mississippi, Chattahoochee, Red River, or even the Brazos; it is the Hudson River. It is not farms they work, it is southside docks and piers along the waterfront. The dream over the horizon line is Manhattan to the east, not wide open spaces to the west. Their characters walk down paved city streets lined with parked cars and honking taxi cabs, not down quiet dusty red dirt roads running through farmland. It isn’t old town squares where lovers meet, its is Church Square Park. When religious life is invoked it’s not the Church of Christ, it’s Our Lady Of Grace Roman Catholic church. When musical heroes are remembered it isn’t Hank Williams, it is Frank Sinatra. The heroes of the silver screen are not Roy Rogers and Gene Autry but Matty “John Wayne” Russo from 1954’s “On the Waterfront.” In fact, the silver screen is The Rivoli Theater, an old vaudeville house, in Rutherford, New Jersey. And perhaps most tellingly, when people leave town for work and better lives, they drive south out of the industrial north and Hoboken’s urban decay, economic decline, and housing crisis.
All this regional colour adds unexpected texture and unfamiliar context to The Delevantes’ very familiar sentimental stories about labourers, heart-shaped lockets, lost love, dads, and family cars. It is the universality of the working-class experience that makes their songs country even if all the touch-points feel foreign and upside-down. The brothers’ harmonies also inescapably put them in a long line of sibling harmony singers in country music history, but how they chose to blended their voices with the musical punch and guitar work of 60’s and 70’s pop music may have made them wish they were cowboys because they received zero play at radio.
I don’t even know if they formally released any singles. If they did, none charted. Recording their debut on Rounder Records all but assured that. Landing a record deal with Capitol Nashville for Postcards From Along The Way was a minor coup. Mike Delevante said, “We were signed by Mark Brown, head of A&R. He had worked with Steve Earle on the publishing side for years so he got us. And Scott Hendricks the president at the time. I had a conversation recently with Mark, we still keep in touch and we talked about this. He had a team of people there that had previously been over at MCA and worked on the Mavericks and a few other acts that leaned more roots than commercial. They told him they wanted a press act. One they could dig in and work on. Also, this new format called “Americana” was getting a lot of attention and they saw it as a bold step. I always remember Scott Hendricks introducing us the night of our record release party. He said something to the effect of “these guys are different, and that’s why we like them.” Scott is a mainstream engineer, producer so for him to give it his blessing was very cool.”
A video was produced for “I’m Your Man” from the album, but that was it. Mike Delevante said, “It’s a pretty common scenario I would imagine: Creative has a vision – they sign a certain act to fulfill that vision – the creative gets fired –the act gets dropped. What’s weird is we actually didn’t get dropped. The new president thought our record was the best record he had. When we met with him he just said ‘I was hired to sell country radio acts, this isn’t a country radio act. I’m not gonna drop you, but I’m not gonna work it either.’”
In hindsight, it is wild the label wasn’t willing to work to country radio what really worked so very well in that format. “My Daddy’s Cadillac” is a nostalgic and uncomplicated song about the joys of driving down Park Avenue, headed nowhere in the back of the family car. “I Know I Promised” is an anguished song about regret and shame stemming from promises made and not kept. It listens like a lonely late night spent driving through empty city streets in the rain. It is the emotionally hardest-hitting track on the album. Listen to “If I Was (I Would Be Love)” and then tell me the songwriters from Alan Jackson’s 1998 single “Right on the Money” were not in some way familiar with it. “Blame it on the Horizon Line” is a special song about wanting to break generational patterns. It is full of lovely details, desperate longing, and gritty hope. “John Wayne Lives in Hoboken” is an unforgettable, quirky, and charming song celebrating hometown pride.
The musicians on the record included John Noreen on steel guitar, Mike Porter on percussion, Garry Tallent on bass, and Benmont Tench on the keys.
Before their record deal, The Delevantes played all the hot spots in Nashville including 12th & Porter, Exit In, Douglas Corner, and The Blue Bird Cafe. They even performed live on the Conan O’Brien Show in 1995. They were a buzzy act at an exciting time in the golden era of country music. They could have been country music contenders in a more equitable time and place.
Postcards From Along the Way is special not because of its objective absolute artistic excellence but because of its unique character and colour. As much as anything The Delevantes demonstrate a sensitivity to the settings of their songs and an empathy for the characters and situation they write about. The brothers never seek a divisive binary of you-versus-me, They are not striving to convert or persuade anyone to their version of a country way of life. They seem content and proud to simply witness their particular Hoboken experience without having to role-play or apologize for not being country enough in the telling of their stories. The album is an honest and sincere iteration of the genre’s larger form.
Mainstream country inviting alt-country/Americana into the Nashville fold never felt as possible as The Delevantes made it sound here.
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