Blue Sky Sundays (Rounder, 2025)

Troubadour JD Clayton returned to his native Arkansas to cut "Blue Sky Sundays" with his working band with the results leading to signing with Rounder Records. It's a varied country rocker filled with jangling guitars and a '70s aesthetic. Nine songs clock in well under 40 minutes.

Opener "Let You Down" begins innocently with strummed guitars and whiffs of harmonica, morphing into a blistering guitar tune with a weird keyboard outro as Clayton wittily explains the futility of finding a restaurant on a Monday night, resulting in a free evening at home. The punchy "Dirt Roads of Red" plays off the notion of streets of gold in heaven, replacing them with Georgia red. "Madalene" was a hastily penned song that as a mid-tempo ballad with singalong qualities met approval with his band mates. The whistling keyboard is a strange touch, however.

"Slow and Steady" is a faithful attempt to rework a pop song, but it just doesn't quite succeed. Clayton overdoes his vocal, vacillating between Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" and Robert Plant, in the re-staging of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Mississippi Kid" to "Arkansas Kid," where he revises the lyrics to be "Oklahoma" and "Arkansas" instead of "Alabama and Mississippi." He's at ease and in more normal vocal form on Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason," one of his favorite songs that he transforms into a stomping rocker.

The autobiographical "High Hopes and Low Expectations" was written with Kendell Marvel who has written major hits for the likes of Chris Stapleton. This is an easy rolling tune that's more refined than the others, chronicling Clayton's journey from Arkansas to Nashville in a rather serendipitous way. "Dance Another Dance" is a true life tale of an office manager that fell in love with Clayton's cousin, but failed to take the first step. Realizing his mistake, he later moved to Colorado to rendezvous with the cousin who had moved there. Yes, a love story based on a second chance, even with Clayton singing their first wedding dance. "Goodbye" is a softer song, being a lullaby of sorts for his now two-year-girl. The song is fine, but the spoken parts two-thirds of the way through are a bit hokey.

Clayton's a strong writer and brings authenticity to this session. A couple of missteps aside, there are some strong gems here as well.