Lead off your album with the right song, and I’m on board for the full ride. Tell me a story, show me what you’ve got musically, but don’t give it all away. Charles Wesley Godwin does just that at the beginning of his second album, How the Mighty Fall. I’m engaged from track one, but he waits to reveal all of his storytelling gifts.
That first song? “Over Yonder” begins with just Godwin’s acoustic guitar and dusty backroad voice before pedal steel, a rugged fiddle line and Rosanna Spindler’s harmonies come in. The song itself, images from life in what could be Godwin’s West Virginia home, are just the beginning of the storytelling to come – lines like “Things got wicked when she’d cry” and “I’m living dying by the pen” hint at a hardscrabble, and probably relatively short, life.