John Kilzer

"Sleeping In The Rain" from John Kilzer's HIDE AWAY, out October 14, 2014 on Archer Records

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Called "a remarkable return to form" and "soulful and compassionate," HIDE AWAY is the latest record from John Kilzer, whose name you may remember from his major label days with Geffen Records (MEMORY IN THE MAKING and "Red Blue Jeans"), his basketball days for the Memphis State Tigers, or even his latest soul work (a Methodist minister, his Friday night service 'The Way' features a rotating band of Memphis' best musicians and focuses on recovery from addiction).

Recorded at Memphis’s Music+Arts Studio, mostly over three days and mostly live, HIDE AWAY found polished songwriter Kilzer stepping up his game even before the tape began rolling.

“You get these kinds of A-Team players in a room, you have to be ready,” he says. “There’s got to be a frisson in a song, some feeling that’s got to be like, okay, is it falling? Is it gonna fly? And we ended up with a kind of transcendental momentum. It was like a conversation going on there in the room. Ironically, all the preparation allowed the music to have an element of chance in it.”

Spin HIDE AWAY and one place you’ll find that element of chance is in its diversity of styles. The prayerful “Love Wants To Give Its Heart To You,” the sinister slide guitar of “Crescent Moon,” the fuzzed-out, organ-inflected pop of “Love Is War,” the ragged down-and-out scenery of “Sleeping In The Rain” – all driven by Kilzer’s careful storytelling and dead-accurate character voices. This is a guy who’s been on the skids and hasn’t forgotten the taut-string feeling of everything starting to come apart… and how sometimes, unexpectedly, the tension can ease just before the snap.

Like a lot of Southern writers, Kilzer’s got a keen sense of how the best can be salvaged out of the worst parts of us, how something bigger can reach down and turn our weaknesses to strengths. Hide Away is a record tuned into that seeming paradox. It’s a record that tells the story of how grace, as Flannery O’Connor once noted, is always within our reach even as we resist it, because we’re scared of the pain it brings. But it’s also a record that describes how that painful grace can transform us, get us through the hard stuff. That’s the story of soul, of gospel, even of the blues. It’s John Kilzer’s story. It’s all our stories, when you get down to the meat of it.

HIDE AWAY is out October 14 on Archer Records.