Michael Martin Murphey
Cowboy Songs Four

After releasing four albums of original songs in the span of four years, from "Tonight We Ride" in 1986 to "Land Of Enchantment" in 1989, Michael Martin Murphey, an established songwriter and icon of country music, decided to shift his career by releasing in 1990 "Cowboy Songs," a collection of folk songs from the American Midwest that achieved great success with both critics and audiences, earning a Gold Record. Riding the wave of that success, he would go on to produce many more albums in this vein, including this "Cowboy Songs Four" in 1998, where original tracks intertwine with traditional compositions, creating a timeless-sounding album, filled with great songs and high-quality melodies.

The common thread linking the 15 tracks of the album is the slowness of the rhythms and the charm of the melodies, which reach their peaks in poignant ballads like "Lonesome Dove," "Born To Be A Cowboy," "Summer Ranges" and "Freewheeler", songs as simple in structure as they are impeccable in melodies and evocative in their bucolic lyricism, without forgetting the lightness of "Easy On The Pain" and the short and orchestrated "The Bunkhouse Orchestra", the fragments of "country life" put to music with rhythm and melodic sensitivity in "Farther Down The Line", "Utah Carroll" and "Little Joe The Wrangler", but the masterpiece, the standout track of the album, is placed right at the end of the tracklist and is called "Night Hawk", a true poem set to music with eight minutes of sublime melody in waltz time that alone is worth the price of the album and balances out some tracks that may be a bit verbose and not exactly essential, like the spoken "Old Horse", the rocking "Born To Buck Bad Luck", which has little to do with the rest of the album, or "Trail Song Medley" (one song is much better than five different fragments put together), but these are shortcomings that can easily be forgiven given the beauty of the rest of the album, an outstanding collection of classics that transcend any division of genre and style, thanks also to the class of this incredibly talented songwriter who, after almost forty years in the business, has not yet stopped making great music.