Low Down Rolling Stone

"Low Down Rolling Stone" settles into its groove the way a good blues song should — like it was always there, like you simply happened to arrive at the moment it chose to make itself heard. The guitar work is central and unhurried, Clark wringing tone from the instrument in the tradition of the great Texas electric blues players: the note itself matters less than what happens to it on the way out. The tempo rolls rather than drives, the rhythm section finding that sweet spot between shuffle and straight time where blues has always lived most comfortably. His voice is rougher here, more knowing, carrying the slightly amused weariness of someone describing a type of person — the restless one, the uncommittable one, the one who moves through relationships the way weather moves through a place — without quite revealing whether he's the observer or the subject. The song belongs aesthetically to the Chicago and Texas blues tradition while making clear it came out of the twenty-first century; Clark has absorbed those influences so completely that the result sounds like inheritance rather than homage. Production keeps the bottom end warm and the guitars slightly front of the mix, which is the correct choice — this is a song about texture and physicality, about the way certain people's company leaves a particular imprint. You reach for it on a slow afternoon, when you want music that doesn't demand anything from you except presence, that makes the room feel larger and the light a little more golden than it probably is.