Dwight Yoakam has long been known to country music fans as a musiciam who is as much artist as he is superstar. Over the course of his fifteen-year career, he has received fourteen Grammy nominations.
One reviewer described his work this way: "Yoakam's lyrics--Leonard Cohen meets Ernest Tubb--work so well because they're literary without being high-minded. The artfulness of the words . . . doesn't always hit you until you read them on the lyric sheet."
Newsweek
called Yoakam's most recent record--titled, like his book,
A Long Way Home
--"a daring departure. It's lush and languid, more introspective than hit-driven. He's looking for subtle emotions, melodic evocations of the distances between people, and he draws on sources as varied as Bobby Darin, Chet Baker, and Buck Owens to get there."
is the first collection of Yoakam's lyrics in book form. It spans his career, from such early albums as
Hillbilly Deluxe
and
Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room
to the recently released, critically acclaimed
. Yoakam's songwriting is really storytelling--he poetically writes of subjects ranging from God to drinking to love--and proves him to be as fine a writer as he is a musician.