Review: Chet O’Keefe – Game Bird

Chet O’Keefe: Game Bird

Another great singer-songwriter Otis Gibbs turned me to Nashville-based Chet O’Keefe with his guest post on the wonderful ninebullets blog. A big thank you goes to Otis for this. Chet O’Keefe is amazing country singer-songwriter and his album Game Bird is utterly wonderful. Listening to this album makes it pretty hard to understand why this man isn’t world famous. At the very least he should get a lot of love in every country, folk, americana orientated blog, webzine and magazine, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment. Surely that’s got to change as soon as the word about this beautiful album starts to spread. I’ll make my tiny contribution here. Chet O’Keefe is a great guitarist, a wonderful songwriter and has a beautiful voice. The album brings to mind all kinds of great country troubadours like Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt and John Prine, but he isn’t copying any of them. There’s no need to, because Chet is such a damn good songwriter. The album ranges from deep, dark and moving songs all the way to upbeat and light numbers and everything works really well. That early trio Good Friends, Econoline Van and Game Bird for example is just so bloody marvelous that you keep thinking that you must be listening to some lost country classic from the 70s. Game Bird just fits on pretty much every occasion. The sound is very pleasant and easily approachable if you are just looking to lay your head on the shoulder of a beautiful country album, but it also has the quality and depth to really move you if you are ready to completely introduce your heart to a great singer-songwriter. Game Bird gets extremely close to full amount of hearts and I probably will regret for not giving them all as soon as I’ve hit the publish button.

Listen to Econoline Van.

Buy/stream the whole album on his bandcamp page.

Chet O’Keefe at Bandcamp

At the moment Game Bird is (probably) only available as a digital download. At least I couldn’t find any physical copies and therefore bought the download from his bandcamp page (maybe the first time I ever bought a full digital album, if I don’t count my one month long emusic subscription year or two ago).