This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
They don’t make ’em like Chuck E. Weiss anymore. Come to think of it, when did they?
Part Delta blues howler, part Tin Pan Alley crooner, part boho-jazzbo hipster, part poet, part Cajun hoodoo man, part soul man, part Tom Waits, part Randy Newman and part Al Jolson, perennial L.A. nighthawk Weiss (the hero of Rickie Lee Jones’ Chuck E.’s in Love) has always been one of a kind. On Old Souls & Wolf Tickets, his followup to 1999’s Extremely Cool, he somehow fuses all his personalities together into some sort of magnificently demented one-man retrospective of 20th-century American music. Mixing and matching sounds and styles like a musical chef — a dash of field holler in your gospel, a pinch of skronk in your Americana, a topping of doo-wop on your Zydeco — Weiss dishes out a lumpy yet flavourful 13-course meal of roots eccentricity and goofball choogle that keeps you coming back for more. The secret ingredient, I suspect, is love. Oh, and bourbon. Lots of bourbon.
