In every case, whether his tone is mocking or sincere, whether he's making fun or casting scorn, Paxton creates believable characters in striking situations using few words. But he remains a friend to coal miners on "Dogs at Midnight" and finds yet another way to decry war in "Jimmy Newman," about a wounded soldier who dies in the hospital. Paxton may seem a bit prudish on "Molly Bloom," in which he mocks James Joyce's Ulysses and comes down on the side of those finding it obscene. "Annie's Going to Sing Her Song," in which a man tells of a woman who keeps leaving him and coming back (and confesses that he always takes her back), is reminiscent of the work of Jacques Brel and comes off as a calmer version of Brel's song "Mathilde." But neither Lehrer nor Brel could have written the leadoff song, "Whose Garden Was This," a futuristic take on the logical results of disastrous ecological trends in which flowers exist only in pictures. The jovial "Forest Lawn," referring to the highly commercialized Los Angeles cemetery for celebrities, easily could have come from the pen of Tom Lehrer, complete with the sly rewrite of "Rock of Ages" in midsong. Paxton's primary influences remain obvious. (Counting his poorly distributed debut live album I'm the Man Who Built the Bridges, it's actually his seventh LP, but never mind.) On the contrary, this is his best and most varied collection for the label yet. The following song list (in alphabetical order by artist) are songs I pretty much know by heart.Six albums into his Elektra Records contract, Tom Paxton's songwriting muse does not fail him on the appropriately titled Tom Paxton 6. The jeep guides up at the Burlingame Cabin call me the "human jukebox" for all the songs I either know or can play with a quick look at the internet.
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