The Circle Game

Rush, Tom

album cover

Laying the Foundation for the Singer-Songwriter Era

Tom Rush started his career as part of the old guard, a folk artist with a sonorous baritone and a healthy repertoire of traditional songs. Almost overnight, the Harvard grad (English lit, what else?) became something else—an early and effective champion of such songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor. This album contains his captivating readings of songs from each of those writers, recorded just before their own recording careers took off. It's a key work, a foundation of the singer-songwriter explosion of the 1970s.

Like Tim Buckley and others, Rush was a coffeehouse king awakened by the great experimentation happening in rock. The Circle Game is Rush's first attempt at a bigger canvas, and it pretty much has every-thing—an active string orchestra supports some tracks (Taylor's "Sunshine Sunshine"), while a kicky country band turns up on others (Charlie Rich's durable "So Long"). Rush doesn't do handstands to sell these tunes—he sounds like he just woke from a dream and is shaking off its effects. His low-key style is particularly well suited to the music of Joni Mitchell. He gets deep into the feeling of internal restlessness that permeates "Urge for Going," and sings in a way that celebrates her precisely drawn images—those renegade clusters of stray words that resonate as exotic and familiar at the same time. Rush interprets Mitchell's songs with the care he gives his own (there are several of his originals here), and hearing his gentle readings, it's hard to believe that these songs, now part of the singer-songwriter "canon," were mostly unknown at the time.

Genre: Folk
Released: 1968, Elektra
Key Tracks: "Tin Angel," "Urge for Going," "No Regrets."
Catalog Choice: Wrong End of the Rainbow
Next Stop: Kris Kristofferson: Kristofferson
After That: Jeff Buckley: Grace
Book Pages: 664–665