Danny Everitt's Acoustic Souvenir is a Texas songwriter's album, sparse and honest. It is precisely produced. Some may think you just can't release something this pure and simple as a finished product anymore; this is a "clean-and-simple" artistic approach. For the astute listener looking for something that gives them room to simplify and not over-saturate the musical taste buds with the sensory overload that contemporary musical entertainment has all too often become these days, there's plenty here too. Within the songwriting itself, Acoustic Souvenir is a body of work that leaves ample room for potentially filling up the spaces in and around the music. At first, the listener might think that the emperor just plain forgot his clothes, but the emperor knows full well he's flying next-to-naked, and that's the whole point. Everitt has clearly fought the urges, and had the artistic sensibility to resist; if only for his own creative reasons; which is the other interesting thing about the disc. It is so compact-sounding; you could almost believe it was first performed on the fly, on a front porch somewhere, or that that's where you're hearing it. Which it almost could be, if it wasn't for how the carefully crafted fret board hard-lefts and hairpin turns by the sidemen blend in and work with Everitt's chord progressions. Chord progressions which, by design, seem to always start out relatively straightforward, but deliberately take interesting twists and turns somewhere along the way so that a player or listener would never see it coming. It's clear that there's no "winging it around the campfire" going on here. The songs are clearly well-crafted, rehearsed, and executed. It sounds like what's right is whatever tastefully fits, and it all tastefully fits together very well. In places, the album subtly pays its homage, with guitar lines on Old Man on the Pier having undercurrents of purity and colorations of John & Paul, while Devil Woman revisits reminiscent ghosts of the late, great Roy Orbison. In other places, as in What Was It, the tunes don't sound reminiscent of anyone but the artist himself, who has penned songs in his own voice and style like this for decades. But with that said, the duet vocals with Kathryn Hallberg bring out recollections of duets between Dave Alvin and Rosie Flores. And while having been first crafted in an era when acoustic solo artists and duos were de rigueur, a fresh rendition of Sunset Highway wears as well as a classic leather jacket from that bygone era, built to last, and yet still feels good and relevant with neither its form nor its function compromised by the clock's ticking. Acoustic Souvenir is a refreshingly real and honest-to-goodness body of work. What you hear is what you get, no smoke, no mirrors, no net below the trapeze. It doesn't sound like it's trying too hard to be the next big thing. It just wants to be the next good thing, which it is. Take it home with you, keep it close. We're so much the better for the finished piece Everitt put forth in Acoustic Souvenir. - Gerry Hailer, Boston, MA