Life ain't always pretty in the big city, as Foster's death attests. And that's one of the reasons folks like yours truly and longtime downtown roots rocker Eddy Lawrence high-tailed it outta town a few years back. Lawrence's latest self-produced one-man opus, Guitars, Guns, & Groceries, is proof that at least one of us has improved his artistic lot in life since leaving the Lower East Side.
    Lawrence reveals himself as a historically sensitive country-rock songwriter with a penchant for Barnumesque oddities and small town ironies on "The Man Who Was Hit by a Comet," "The Day the Humvee Came" and the title track, an ode to Dick's Country Store, Music Oasis and Gun City in the Canadian/New York border town near Lawrence's rural upstate retreat. I'm mighty partial to "1931," the bittersweet memoirs of a ventriloquist's dummy, and "Just Down the Road from Shania Twain," in which Eddy muses "I wonder if her mother really gave her that name/I live just down the road from Shania Twain." Beats "Green Acres" and having to stomach that whiner, Mr. Haney, and Eva Gabor's hot water soup, don't it?

Kevin Roe
Roots World

Living and recording on solar and wind power in northern New York, Eddy Lawrence is the epitome of the D.I.Y. ethic. His album credits list everything from a Genesee Light beer carton (part of his faux drum kit) to the model and make of his solar panels and shotgun. Lawrence's lo-fi folk rock is much less imposing than the gun-in-your-face album cover may suggest, but lyrically there are plenty of barbed wire characterizations and witty bear traps to keep you alert. On "Just Down the Road from Shania Twain" (which is where he lives) Lawrence gives you a tour of the neighborhood, from Dan the UPS guy to the pot-selling neighbor with the half-blind dog. The mild twang in Lawrence's voice and his down-home guitar solos add to the folksy nature of these twisted American tales.

Steve Ciabattoni
CMJ

Eddy Lawrence's latest release, Guitars, Guns, & Groceries, is a great record....the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me. I can't stop listening to it, and it is constantly on at my workplace. Eddy Lawrence's stories are fascinating and fun to listen to. His guitar playing is unassuming and relaxing.

Evan Lavine
Plattsburgh
Press-Republican

    I first heard Eddy Lawrence's "Just Down the Road from Shania Twain's" on Gary Glabraith's KAOS radio show and was struck immediately by it. One listen and I fell ass-over-teakettle in love with it. It's an amazing short story with a rock beat, intricate guitar fills and a totally hooky chorus that will have you singing about Shania Twain even if, like me, you've never seen her or heard her music.
    The whole CD is like that, full of amazing stories and penetrating insights into the human soul. There's a story about "Mark the Shark," a DJ on the Mohawk reservation who has more dedication than the U.S. mail, and another about helping the National Guard pull their Humvee out of a ditch in his front yard. Each one of these is sung in a most casual manner as if the events had occurred earlier in the day and he was just telling us about it now. Stories that most people would take a few paragraphs to explain Lawrence concisely sums up in one clever line and adds music to boot.
    His song about a narrator who meets a chambermaid in Duluth and traces her hapless history before falling in love with her, has a chorus of "Surely you could say that she was foolish/And the bad luck that she had was just her fault, but she was smart enough to know/She had to do something stupid, or she'd never do nothing at all."
    Lawrence has a funny side that's comparable to Loudon Wainwright III's deadpan humor, and this sixth self-produced CD is stuffed with great songs that, like Jim Carroll's poems, are worthy of hardback publication. If you care more about words than just getting bammed on the music, then this is for you.

Tucker Petertil
The Olympian

    A Reliance portable toilet, a Genny Lite beer carton and a Remington 870 Express 20 Gauge shotgun are usually not listed as instruments on a CD's jacket. But then, there's only one CD called Guitars, Guns, & Groceries, Eddy Lawrence's latest effort. And most musicians don't live in a solar-and wind-powered house in upstate New York.
    It makes sense that Lawrence uses these unconventional instruments to make music. He writes songs that use life's little authenticating details to stir up larger truths and deeper meanings.
    Lawrence seems to be split between the poetry of John Hiatt on songs such as "Mark the Shark" and the cynicism of Warren Zevon, as displayed on "Just Down the Road from Shania Twain."

Burlington Free Press