Review: Grayson Capps Has Wife and Longtime Producer Pick Songs for Retrospective 'South Front Street'

How songs are selected for compilation albums has always been something that interested me. For Top 40 bands compiling “greatest hits” collections, it's simple. Pick the songs that charted highest or had the longest traction, throw in an album cut or two and maybe a new song to get fans to buy, and go. For more independent artists, it's a little more difficult. Most try to pull a collection of songs from across their collection that best represent that period or just stock it with songs that are most popular live. For Americana Grayson Capps, who released his retrospective album South Front Street: A Retrospective 1997-2019 on 6/19, the process was really easy; he just left the whole thing to his wife.

Not that his wife isn't supremely qualified for the job. Capps is married to Trina Shoemaker, the 3x Grammy Award winning producer and engineer (and the first woman to ever win the Grammy for Best Engineered Album) for a wide range of artists in multiple genres, from Steven Curtis Chapman and Sheryl Crow to Blues Traveler and Queens of the Stone Age. The result is a “hits” collection that is less about hits or even live favorites and more about songs that “stretched” Capps, showing his willingness across his career to pull influences from a wide range of musical styles and geographies.

There's plenty of the swampy New Orleans gothic blues that Capps is best known for. The best example of this is “Junior and the Old African Queen”, from his album Songbones. The tale of a gnarled old swamp fisherman who passes his evenings in the pub weaving tall tales of his mudboating days on a boat named for the famed African Queen; tall tales about catching so many frogs he almost sank the boat and his shady days as an “outlaw” of an undefined nature.

“Arrowhead”, from his album Rott & Roll, is another celebration of the eccentricities of the bayou's residents. The song is told from the perspective of a man who is reflecting on the simple pleasures of rural life, a daughter and son, and finding an arrowhead buried in the mud. But also the simple pleasures of watching his neighbors, from the guy who catches, cooks, and eats snails “shells and all”, to neighbors he invites to go swimming in the muddy waters “right in my back yard.

“Rock and Roll”, from The Lost Cause Minstrels is a different kind of character portrait, a skewering of the glamorous life of a rock and roller. Instead of groupies and trashed hotel rooms, Capps' club hopper has “rotten teeth in my head from smoking too many cigarettes and drinking every day” and remembers “when I was bright and pure, but now I'm not too sure, stealing groceries from the IGA.”

But it's also a catalogue of Capps' growth as an artist. Some of the album's most successful tracks come from his latest album, 2017's Scarlett Roses. Despite its late entry chronologically, that album's “New Again”, with backing vocals from Dylan LeBlanc, is a reminder that Capps is an artist who continues to evolve, opening up his New Orleans blues-rock to more Gulf Shores stylings pulled from his time with Shores-area supergroup Willie Sugarcapps. It's one of Capps' more philosophical albums, noting “every day I'm born again, but not in any kind of Christian sense” before crooning “many of my friends have died, I never got to say goodbye. The dead, they don't miss you when they're gone.”

For many of the songs, Shoemaker went through an remastered them, cleaning up some of the less stellar production of the earlier, low budget efforts. The result is an album that will be a good “intro to Grayson Capps” for new listeners but also one that will have just enough different material to make it worth a buy for fans who have all of the albums.

With COVID-19 having everything up in the air, it's hard to say when you'll get to see Capps in concert again, but for now, you can see his semi-regular virtual busking series (often running 2+ hours) on his Facebook page.