JOHN LEVENTHAL

Rumble Strip

RumbleStrip Records (auditioned as CD). 2024. Leventhal, prod.; Leventhal, Jim Price, Mark Cordell, Gavin Lurssen, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS

Across John Leventhal’s 45-year career, he has produced records that won close to 20 Grammy Awards, written songs performed by artists from Joe Cocker to Shawn Colvin, and worked in the studio with musicians as varied as Jackson Browne and Johnny Cash. But until now, he has never occupied the role of “solo artist.” That changes with the release of Rumble Strip.

The record combines Leventhal’s signature guitar work with his passion for instrumental, classical, soul, country, and jazz-infused improvisational music. The album is assembled like a soundtrack, with instrumentals dominating the record, interspersed by vocal-driven tracks that act like runways and exit ramps. The guitar parts are often layered. They are sharp and never wilt, with a clarity that underscores Leventhal’s great command of the instrument. It’s a sophisticated sound with presence and purpose.

Despite the prevalance of instrumentals, the record’s finest moments are the ones with vocals, by Leventhal and Rosanne Cash, his wife. The vocal songs have a character that feels cautious, dark, and lonesome—all evident, for example, on the single “That’s All I Know About Arkansas” and also on “The Only Ghost,” co-written with Marc Cohn, originally for Dr. John’s final album. Here, the secret sauce simmers on the front burner. Their voices join in ways that induce chills. The songs stick with you long after the record has ended.

Rumble Strip is cinematic in sound and scope but in a way that’s personal and sits close. The front and back covers—the boy on the front, the adult on the back—act as a metaphor for the journey captured across the album’s 16 tracks, with tales that live between those two life stages, the author of that life winding up older and wiser with 45 years of tales to tell, a few of them told here.