Bill Price - With The Eye Of A Skeptic (Grass Magoops Records) It appears that Bill Price has been hoovering up the ‘small’ stories. Those stories born and raised in Americana, which have been loitering with intent, and just needed someone to write them down and serve them up. With a delicious little bit of music, of course, and thus turn them out splendidly. The album is a superbly literate set of 14 songs, one of the best of which, “In A Flying Dream”, epitomises Bill Price’s exceptional ability to make words into pictures: ‘In a flying dream, Custer was a poet, In a flying dream little Big Horn was a band, In a flying dream Napoleon conquered his fear instead, China’s Great Wall was only sand.’ Even better, though, is the WW2 veteran soldier’s anthem, “Henry’s War”, self-explanatory except that there is still a war raging for this stalwart of battle, and it’s closer to home... The whole set is so beautifully simple you wonder why on earth it hasn’t been done before, until you remember that the simple things are, more often than not, the hardest to capture. In this world crowded with literate singer-songwriters (and quite a few duds besides) it ain’t easy to get the recognition that should come their way. I have to hope that Bill gets the acclaim he deserves pretty soon, before we are all viewing this world with a dubious eye. www.billprice.info Kev A. Next