Ryan Bingham

Fear and Saturday Night

Recorded mostly live 'Fear and Saturday Night' opens with "Nobody Knows My Trouble," a loping, autobiographical ballad about trying to outrun a painful past. "Adventures Of You And Me" is a slide-guitar and mariachi-tinged barn-burner about a pair of misfits who travel the country together, while "Island In The Sky" again picks up the theme of travel as a means of salvation and escape.

Bingham faces down his past with a poetic grace throughout the album. "Radio" is about coping with a darkness that doesn't want to let go, searching for a safe place to make sense of your life and the strength to stay on the right track through it all, while "Hands of Time" deals with accepting what's behind you and moving forward with grit and determination. On "Broken Heart Tattoos," a wistful waltz written to an unborn child, he imagines what kind of parent he'll become." Perhaps the most affecting moment on the album arrives in the title track, when Bingham sings, "I don't fear nothin' except for myself / So I'm gonna go out there and raise me some hell."

Those hard-learned lessons, through both good times and bad, helped make Bingham the man he is today. 'Fear and Saturday Night' is the most authentic, personal, and deeply moving portrait of that man we've heard yet.