Album Review: Rik Palieri, 'Hands of Time'

Rik Palieri, Hands of Time Credit: Courtesy

(Self-released, CD, vinyl, digital)

Dusk settles, and the troubadour takes a moment to appreciate the truck stop. Surrounded by nomadic truckers killing time on iPhones while the rain pours down, his thoughts turn to his baby back home. He has many, many miles to go before he can sleep, but his thoughts dwell on her, the light at the end of the tunnel for a weary traveler.

Rik Palieri’s “Living in a Truckstop,” from his 17th album, has all the ingredients of an American fable: interminably long roads, endless trucks, the plight of the workingman as he pines for a distant sweetheart. “Trucker number seven, your shower is ready,” he sings as the song comes to a close. There are few songwriters around more suited to score this particular brand of American folklore.

The track kicks off Hands of Time, a fitting title for a songwriter who represents a direct connection to the elder wizards of folk music. Palieri learned to play banjo from Pete Seeger’s 1962 instructional book, How to Play the 5-String Banjo. By the mid-1970s, Palieri was performing with Seeger as part of the legendary singer’s Hudson River Sloop Singers. He’s followed in Seeger’s footsteps — sometimes literally — ever since.

Palieri’s career has been that of a traveling bard: touring the country and the globe relentlessly, playing music, and telling and collecting stories. He’s written articles for folk magazine Sing Out! and hosted a television show on Vermont Community Access Media called “The Songwriter’s Notebook.” He’s penned two memoirs: The Road Is My Mistress: Tales of a Roustabout Songster in 2003 and Banjo Man: Adventures of an American Folk Singer in 2020.

For all the folk history he’s chronicled and contributed to, the 69-year-old still has some tricks up his sleeve. In Hands of Time, Palieri looks back to his earliest musical memories, when his grandmother Katherine introduced him to country-and-western music through the likes of Johnny Cash, Roger Miller and Johnny Horton. In the past decade or so, Palieri has delved back into that world more deeply, often traveling to Nashville to meet with country legends such as Marty Stuart and Jeannie Seely.

The effect of his efforts is palpable on Hands of Time. From the title track’s weeping pedal steel guitar to the hobo love letter “Riding on the Westbound,” with its rolling banjo and keening fiddle, the album might as well be wearing a rhinestone fringe jacket.

While Palieri’s country turn might not seem as extreme a switch as, say, Beyoncé or Post Malone’s recent records, he sticks the landing. “Just Too Old to Still Die Young” is a rollicking, slap-your-hands-on-your-denim jam that serves as the album’s de facto anthem. “Camp Broken Heart” shouts out all the country tropes: broken-down trailers, a yard full of junk and a man down on his luck with love.

“I’m just a poor child of God / I got no place to rest my head,” Palieri intones over a banjo and surprisingly fitting steel drums on “Got No Place to Rest My Head.” Like so much of the record, the song obsesses over the notion of people who have lost everything except the will to sing.

Hands of Time is about more than just an old folk songwriter scratching a country itch. It’s a survival guide from an artist who knows that when the times get tough, you pick up your guitar — or banjo.

Hands of Time is available on all major streaming services.