JOHN HIATT

Only The Song Survives

NEW WEST 8/10

All the Master of Disaster’s output since 2000 – across 15 vinyl LPS The first quartercentury of John Hiatt’s 45-year career has been amply compiled, and now Only The Song Survives completes the picture: this lavish boxset comprises the 11 albums the prolific writer/artist has recorded during the first two decades of the 21st century, 126 songs in all. The collection takes Hiatt from the ages of 47 to 66, retirement age for many of his generation, but not this guy, for whom making music is as natural as breathing. He’s shown remarkable consistency during those 19 years, reflecting on his wayward youth on 2000’s stripped-down Crossing Muddy Waters, celebrating the comfort and joy of long-term relationships on 2008’s homemade Same Old Man, and contemplating the looming existential questions on 2018’s rollickingly elegiac The Eclipse Sessions. Just as essential are The Tiki Bar Is Open

(2001) and Beneath This Gruff Exterior

(2003), on which his longtime band The Goners, featuring Louisiana slide wizard Sonny Landreth, lets it wail; 2005’s Master Of Disaster, a hickorysmoked slab of Memphis soul on which producer Jim Dickinson brings his sons Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars; and 2014’s Terms Of My Surrender, Hiatt’s only dedicated blues album. Throughout, the songs and settings fit together like well-worn jeans and boots.

Extras: 8/10. 48-page book with wry recollections from Landreth, Luther Dickinson, Ry Cooder, Steve Earle, Patterson Hood and others.