Cowboy in Sweden
Free to ramble in the heady post-"Boots" days, a newly minted Lee Hazlewood traveled abroad, ultimately landing in Sweden, a locale which would inspire some of his strongest work. His key artistic associate in Sweden was the film director Torbjrn Axelman, and together the two masterminded the film and album projectCowboy In Sweden. The album went gold in Sweden, and was the first of several acclaimed Hazlewood/Axelman collaborations.Two talented female vocalists are a big part ofCowboy's sound. Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokom bring heavenly voices and unique approaches to Hazlewood material which would have been way too sophisticated, in its humour as much as its subject matter, for mainstream pop audiences. Hokom was a successful, gender-gap smashing producer in her own right, her credits including the one and only album by the International Submarine Band, fronted by a young Gram Parsons, on Lee's LHI label. Lizell has maintained a successful singing career, performing throughout Scandinavia and Europe to this day.The music on this album is prime Hazlewood: a singular synthesis of cowboy rambles, rockabilly rhythms and symphonic pop. His dark, poetic lyrics intertwine hard luck tales, pragmatic politics and love odes. Peppered with esoteric images and declaimed with wit, irony and wry honesty, they prefigure the self-conscious/self-referencing mania of successive generations of lyricists.Tracks like the almost whispered anti-war meditation "No Train To Stockholm", the Bacharachian coyness of "Hey Cowboy" and the honky-tonk-meets-strings of "Pray Them Bars Away" display his utterly unique muse in full splendor. An ideal entre into the Hazlewood oeuvre.