Long Journey

iTunes Review

“I’m what they call a CC, a colorful character,” Michael Hurley announces on the amiable folk blues “You Got To Find Me.” Later in the same song, he reveals that he has healed a dog of cancer, can in fact heal any known disease, then offers to fix your car for cheap, you colorful chickadee, you. There may be those who are immune to Hurley’s CC charms — upright citizens, no doubt, with interesting careers and fulfilling hobbies — but one can’t help but think they’re missing out. With its eccentric blend of folk, country, blues, and bluegrass, this is old-time music as reimagined by a hobo with boundless affection for beef stew, gin sloes, pretty ladies, and animals that talk. The lazy clicks of Hurley’s tongue stand in for pool balls in “The 8-Ball Café”; a loping banjo and the screech of what sounds like a kazoo mimic “The Monkey on the Interstate”; and a scratchy minor-key fiddle announces not some somber, “authentic” backwoods reel but the gnomic “Hog of the Forsaken” (which appeared on the Deadwood soundtrack, thereby quadrupling, surely, the number of Hurley-hearers in the land). Hurley’s music is not for folk purists, literalists, or type-A personalities. All others should apply.