Wreckless Eric “Transience” 2019. Southern Domestic Records. This past Saturday we had the joy of seeing Wreckless Eric (Eric Goulden) play an intimate show at a club in our neighborhood. He is a truly lovely man (and very, very chatty – we spoke to him for at least 10 or more minutes after the show, with him doing about 90% of the talking) with even lovelier songs.

Best known for his song “Whole Wild World” (1977 – considered by many to be one of the best punk/alternative singles of the era and of course he performed it on Saturday night), Eric continues to write and has just restarted touring  after the pandemic pause. Transience is his latest release and just his 8th LP in over 40 years.  It’s jangly singer-songerwriter styled rock with an intimate, deeply personal feel. Eric’s liner notes give context to each track – he describes the album as “a succession of Raymond Carver short stores.” The opener “Father to the Man” is about his own father who sounds like he was a very conflicted, challenged man. I’d love to know more about “The Half of It” – in the notes he alludes to “three halves” which happened in Hollywood “knocking aside Ray Davies, Neil Young, Kenneth Anger, Nick Lowe, Marie Prevost, Donald Sutherland, The Day of the Locust and some dumb Hollywood studio tour.” The song “Creepy People (In the Middle of the Night)” has, while not sounding “punk” in the standard definition of the genre (it’s more like Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones), the most punk sensibility: “Creepy people turn a creep profit, manufacture the steroids and the psychiatric conditions, the terminal illness, the long life-extending treatments that are so much more profitable than the cures. Creepy people close down libraries and schools, and cut the education budgets. Creepy people want to populate the world with morons who’ll believe anything they’re told and do anything they’re told to do.” “Indelible Stain” is one of my favorite songs on the LP – it has a 60′s psychedelic sound and a dreamy, hypnotic groove.