Review: Bill Toms and Hard Rain, It’s All We’re Fighting For
By Nick Cristiano
Back in 2011, Bill Toms closed his album Memphis with bluesman Earl King’s “Let’s Make a Better World,” an infectious sermon in song popularized by Dr. John: “You got to live and give, share and care/ Really put some love in the air/ When you’re neighbor’s down, try to pick him up/ Nobody should live in despair.”
In the liner notes, Memphis producer Will Kimbrough, the esteemed singer and songwriter, describes how Toms embodies that ethos with his music: “Bill Toms is a poet, a soul-shouter and a guitar slinger with one foot in the gutter and an eye on the heavens above.”
Kimbrough nailed it. Ever since leaving his tenure as a guitarist with Pittsburgh’s Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers, Toms has been an indefatigable rock-and-soul warrior of the highest order. With his longtime band, Hard Rain, he exudes an expansive generosity of spirit that reflects the idealism and romanticism at the heart of the best rock-and-roll, but he grounds it all in street-level reality and hard-earned faith.
You can hear it in studio albums like Memphis, Good for My Soul, and Keep Movin’ On, and incendiary live sets such as Live at Moondog’s and Live Featuring the Soulsville Horns.
They should have made Toms a lot better known, but if he’s down about that, he’s not showing it, because now he has outdone himself with It’s All We’re Fighting For, 10 terrific new originals and a tougher-than-the-Stones take on “Miss You.”
Toms and Hard Rain, which still includes such stalwarts as keyboardist Steve Binsberger, bassist Tom Valentine, and saxophonist Phil Brontz, as well as producer and guest multi-instrumentalist Rick Witkowski, come barreling out of the gate with the title track, a horn-stoked anthem that pleads for “love and happiness.” “Freedom Rider” is a funky strut with Toms testifying in his warm growl: “Take me to that promised land/ Take me there tonight.”
“Shake and Shout” is a slab of exhortatory R&B (“Everybody raise your hand!”) that, like “Freedom Rider,” echoes the gospel undertones that have long permeated Toms’ music. “Give a Poor Man a Quarter” uses hard-edged rock-and-soul to deliver a warning: “Don’t come around here pushing hate anymore.” “You’re Coming Up (You Got the Power),” on the other hand, is pure sweet soul, trumpeting “It’s a brand new day.” (“Trumpeting,” indeed – check out the horn solo by George Arner.) “Come Saturday Night,” an unabashed declaration of love, is one of the numbers here in which the horns enter late, to thrilling effect.
If the roof-raising material packs even more muscle than before, the slower and quieter moments have an even more sublime air, with Toms proving as expressive a balladeer as he is a shouter.
“Walking on Water” uses soothing soul to underscore its super-romantic message. “What Might Have Been” is a piano-accented ballad that achingly reflects on lost love, with an exquisitely lyrical guitar solo and a mournful sax solo.
The penultimate number, “I Fulfilled My Dream,” sounds like a great, world-weary summation (“Please say for me I gave it all I had”). But Toms isn’t finished. He closes with “Here,” another pensive number. “We’re still chasing every dream,” he declares, indicating that the drive that has fueled all this righteously inspiring music, and the desire to make a better world with it, still burns brightly.
“Walking On Water”
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