Thirty-five years after scoring their biggest-ever hit with Rusty Young’s “Crazy Love,” Poco finally returns with a suitable successor called “Regret” – a song so full of sweet reminiscence that it’s difficult to believe this isn’t a leftover track from the 1970s.
Young, the last remaining founding member of Poco and the only one to have appeared in all of its many incarnations through the years, is joined by bassist Jack Sundrud, drummer George Lawrence and a newcomer in multi-instrumentalist Michael Webb on the just-released All Fired Up, Poco’s first album of new material in 13 years. Sundrud has been with Poco since 1985, while Lawrence first appeared with the band in 1999.
Still, “Regret” couldn’t hearken back more to Poco’s deeply idyllic, instantly recognizable California country sound, even if departed members like Paul Cotton, Richie Furay, Jim Messina, Randy Meisner or Timothy B. Schmit weren’t on board.
Elsewhere, they touch all of the Americana bases (from bluegrass on the title track, to folk on “Hard Country,” to blues on “Rocking Horse Blues); they even laugh it up a bit with the humorous “Neil Young,” wherein Rusty denies any family lineage with the former Buffalo Springfield and CSNY member. I kept coming back to the deeply nostalgic, completely enveloping “Regret,” though.
It’s there, maybe more than any place else on All Fired Up, where Poco reclaims its mantle as the wellspring of a hundred other denim-clad pop-rock bands, many of them much better known – from the Eagles to Firefall to the Little River Band to Pure Prairie League – and it’s also where Poco sounds nothing so much like itself.
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About time, I grew up with their music; cannot wait to here this!