DANNY BROOKS & LIL MISS DEBI

ARE YOU READY?

2021-01-26

The husband and wife duo, Danny Brooks and Lil Miss Debi, are joined on this 20 track set by a host of musicians who add heaping doses of guitars, keys, horns and background vocals. The resulting set covers a broad swath of blues, roots and Americana. Unlike many straight blues discs, the duo do not focus their attention on bad luck, bad relationships or bad habits. Instead, much of the material here extols the virtues of love as the antidote to bad choices, "Broken", the need to grab tightly onto love lest it disappear from your grasp, "Hold On To Love", the fact that life doesn’t have a lot of meaning without love, "Without Love", and the necessity of being honest about the true nature of a relationship, "Let Me Know". Elsewhere, they focus on the need to always do the right thing, "No Easy Way Out", the need to take stock of how your debits and credits add up in life, "Where Will You Stand", and the need to look outside yourself once in a while for answers, "Climb That Mountain". They also ruminate on the distance between always being just short of where you need to be, "One More Mile", and finally finding the way to the comfort of home and the relationships that are important, "Coming Home". Not everything here is so philosophical. The title track is an energetic rocker that sets the stage for a weekend party quoting Free’s "All Right Now" while "Me and Brownie McGhee" is Brook’s autobiographical tale of the night he joined Brownie McGhee on stage and proved his mettle as a bluesman. "Rock N Roll Was the Baby" repeats the old cliché that the daddy of rock and roll was the blues. In addition to taking on a wide variety of topics, the band also spreads its sonic wings to include folk, "Angel from Montgomery", Reggae, "Jamaica Sun" and Cajun, "Put a little Rock N’ Roll In Your Soul". Lyrically and sonically diverse, there is much to like about this disc. Smitty

review by Mark