Last summer I had interviewed the easy-going and incredibly charming singer/songwriter Charlie Greene for the site about his 2012 release Wildfire Music, his incredibly eclectic influences and his songwriting process, which he openly admitted is much more difficult than expected. And much like Caitlin Rose’s 2013 release, Much like Caitlin Rose’s latest effort, Greene’s Wildfire Music has a sweetly, easy-going 70s AM radio, easy-listening, country twang vibe. But lyrically, the material belies it’s easy-going nature as Greene’s vocals express a deeply aching, desperate yearning, a sense of regret and despair with an unflinching and affecting level of candor. With a novelist’s attention to detail, each song’s narrator feels like a fully fleshed out person with dashed hopes and expectations, their own dysfunctions that they often can’t completely understand, along with motivations and desires that either go unexpressed or are unrecognized. Even with our best intentions, human life and human relationships can be – well, messy.

Greene’s self-titled sophomore effort will see a February 25th release, and the album’s first single “Man on Fire” is manages to maintain Greene’s attention to detail, but manages to be much more lighthearted than the material on Wildfire Music as it focuses on a man who’s desperately attempting to express his madly, desperate desire for someone who in his eyes “blackens out the sun” but finds himself hopelessly (and spectacularly) failing. Much like Wildfire Music, “Man on Fire” maintains that sweetly, easy-going 70s AM radio twang while managing to feel incredibly loose, as though Greene and his backing band were playing at some shitty honky tonk, drinking beers and shots in between songs and sets.