Dusty Wright dusts off his favorite songs

By Henry Lipput

On Dusted Off, Dusty Wright’s fine new covers album, he has recorded some of his favorite songs as well as the ones he enjoys playing live.

Wright has chosen songs from the 1950’s to the 1970’s and in doing so he has reimagined them and made them his own. The two best examples of this are his covers of “Walk On The Wild Side” and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.”

On “Walk On The Wild Side” Wright turns Lou Reed’s glorified take of New York City’s Lower East Side of the early 1970s into a sad, melancholic look at the sex and drugs that permeated that time.

With “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” Wright’s version of The Monkees song (written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart who wrote many of the band’s other hits) a response to a lover’s taking advantage becomes a mid-60s psychedelic journey. Wright has mentioned that his version is influenced by the Paul Revere and The Raiders cover but what we hear on Dusted Off is a whole different animal.

“That’s All Right” is neither a recreation of Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions version or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s original but instead the sound looks away from a rave up but to Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Stephen Still’s coming-of-age song “4+20,” like the CSNY Déjà Vu track, has acoustic guitar but Wright adds textured electric guitars that conjure up a hazy, long-ago vibe.

“The Mighty Quinn” and “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” show Wright’s obvious debt to the songwriting of Bob Dylan. Wright loves these songs and you can hear it in his voice. For the digital bonus track “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” Wright recorded a slowed down yet faithful version of the original with a Dylanesque harmonica topping it off. And by slowing down the song he doesn’t try to match the avalanche of words from Dylan’s vocal but makes them understood.