Old Kit Bag, The

What's perhaps most remarkable about this album - by one reckoning, his twenty-fifth, without even counting the six he recorded as a member of Fairport Convention - is its distillation of all that precedes it in his catalogue. For more than thirty years Thompson has grown as an artist by carefully paring his work down to its essence. As a culmination of this process, 'Kit Bag', recorded in spare trio format with minimal overdubs, is a textbook lesson on how to convey layers of meaning with minimal gestures. "The idea was to keep it small", Thompson explains. "I did do a few overdubs - second guitar, dulcimer, single-finger keyboard parts, all the easy stuff -- but other than that, everything was pretty much a live performance". The result is an intimate, smoky quality from which each story slowly unfolds.

Producer John Chelew (John Hiatt, Five Blind Boys of Alabama), a master of bringing out the narrative in excellent songs, found the balance between clarity and atmosphere on these tracks, making 'Kit Bag' a standout even in Thompson's imposing discography.