Barton Carroll is the kind of songwriter that gets taken for granted. In a modestly fragile tenor, he relates real stories instead of impressionistic poetry or woe-is-me folk confessions, full of acute observations and complex emotional developments. It's literary in the sense that he has a strong grasp of character and voice, not in the sense that he favors big words or clever turns of phrase. Carroll may never be called innovative, but he can't be called showy either, which places him in the school of troubadours like Freedy Johnston and John Hiatt, who have a similar folksy bent and a shared itch to try on new perspectives.
Carroll's fourth solo album, Together You and I, marks a great step forward from his previous releases, which were mostly solid collections of studied songs and varied lives. On the new material, he sounds more comfortable in these disparate points of view, and thanks to producer Graig Markel, he can better bend the musical elements to reinforce the lyrics. Illuminated by Craig Flory's raunchy-sweet saxophone, the witty "Past Tense" struts with a Sun Studios shuffle that bolsters the bluster of its narrator, who is hot for teacher: "Well, Little Miss Professor's got a problem with me/ Ever since you went and got a master degree."
Throughout "The Poor Boy Can't Dance", Carroll's narrator-- an American immigrant in Britain-- steels himself to dance with the boss' daughter at a wedding, swallowing shot after shot. Rather than leave his fate undetermined, Carroll soldiers through to a potentially happy ending as a swing band cuts in to remind listeners of both the setting and the stakes. "Rich as a Rolling Stone" recounts a very different romantic encounter, one full of miscommunications and cross purposes between an overeager man and a grounded woman. She counters and contradicts his practiced compliments, revealing a realistic outlook that only seems like cynicism: In fact, she wants a man who "would be beautiful like Buddy Holly and rich as a Rolling Stone," and she's not afraid to keep looking. Playing referee, Carroll sings with an uneasy tone, slurring his words almost drunkenly but pushing the song at a subtly nervous clip that implies a fraught exchange.
Carroll flirts with cliché in many of these songs, but only so he can twist the story. "Shadowman" plays out as a tale of a favored son and a black sheep, and just when the story seems most predictable, it flies off into darker territory as Carroll sketches out the unexpected tragedies that fill every life. Dispelling certain easy notions of true love and secure relationships, Together You and I recounts characters trying desperately to turn chance meetings and petty hook-ups into something longer and more meaningful. "Do you want to get out of here?" he asks an unidentified woman on a song with the same title. "I don't need to finish my beer." No one ever finishes their beer on Together You and I, and it's to his considerable credit that Carroll makes clear that many of these denizens come to regret leaving that glass half emptied.
