"I need to get away," David Dondero sang on his last album, 2010's # Zero with a Bullet. "I really need to get away from me." As David Bevan pointed out in his review, Dondero sounded like a man on his last professional leg, a cowboy staggering with a bullet wound. He'd been in the music business for nearly 20 years, playing in a variety of genres and bands before settling into a solo career playing dusty country folk. His warbly vocal style inspired Conor Oberst, and NPR's "All Things Considered" called him one of the best living songwriters, yet sales remained negligible over the years, even after he signed to his protégé's Team Love Records. It's understandable that any artist might be discouraged with such a lousy return on his creative investment, and at the risk of coming across as bitter or entitled, # Zero with a Bullet exorcised that frustration even as it threatened to make failure the theme of this phase in Dondero's career.
His quick-on-the-heels follow-up, A Pre-Existing Condition, is the artist getting away from Team Love, from electric guitars, from himself. In addition to returning to Ghostmeat Records, which released Dondero's first two solo efforts in 1999 and 2000, he revisits an older sound and older songs: At distinct odds with # Zero, A Pre-Existing Condition is an all-acoustic record, relying on guitars, upright bass, and harmonica as well as shakers, tambourine, and caxixi. It's a rough-and-tumble sound, no less sophisticated for sounding so spontaneous, especially when William Tonks' dobro illuminates the cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears".
Of the baker's dozen tracks, only four are Dondero originals-- three if you believe "Please Hand Me Over to the Undertaker" is actually a decades-old gothic blues number (it sounds like one). The remaining nine tracks are covers ranging from Lowell George's trucker anthem "Willin'" to Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train" to "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'", a massive hit for Charley Pride. Unshouldering the songwriting burden, Dondero sounds lighter and more engaged, his signature vocal style lending these songs a loose interpretive touch. He even has the temerity to adapt Jimmie Rodgers' "T for Texas" for a cheap shot at you-know-who: "Gonna shoot that dirty hipster that stole my voice away." The song, however, can't really support the sentiment, which sounds like a too-clever twist ending.
By design, A Pre-Existing Condition is a ramshackle affair-- not quite a covers album or a new direction. Instead, it's an album as therapy, Dondero's reminder to himself of why he got into this business and why he stays. For him, music is a way to make sense of the world, which is becoming increasingly nonsensical. Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" sounds newly topical, a Great Depression anthem that resonates during the Great Recession, and he makes those final lines a very specific accusation: "You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home." That's much more damning than the title track, a health care blues that rhymes "social Darwinism" with "capitalism." As a protest song, it overreaches, but maybe it's his way of stealing back from Oberst. A Pre-Existing Condition likely won't win Dondero any new fans or convince any holdouts, but that's not really the point. He's content simply to play for himself. The album may sound slight in 2011, but it has the potential to be pivotal if Dondero sounds rejuvenated on the follow-up.
