Listening Party: Guy Workman and The Marc Higgins Band

Here’s the gimmick: Each week, we’ll pick two local bands — an opening act and a headliner — link to a site where you can listen to their songs for free, then ask you to spend a few moments of your precious time to tell us what you think about them. Some may be great, others may be mediocre or awful — that’s for you to decide — all we ask is that you listen with an open mind.

Opening act: Guy Workman

It has always seemed to me that the biggest challenge in being a professional songwriter or acoustic folk/country performer is trying to stand out from the crowd. After all, there’s really only so many variations of style, melody and phrasing available to someone when their tools are generally limited to a voice and an acoustic guitar. In order to stand out from the crowd of would-be Dylans and Guthries, you’ve really got to have something special.

Which brings us to Spartanburg’s Guy Workman, a longtime veteran of the folk circuit and a former Nashville-based songwriter. According to his bio, Workman has had four of his songs make the Billboard chart — one performed by himself, the rest as performed by Boxcar Willie. He’s played with an impressive collection of performers — Doc and Merle Watson, Joe Cocker, David Allen Coe, David Childers, Michael Reno Harrell, Malcolm Holcombe, Jonathan Byrd — and seems to have no shortage of connections in the music industry. He’s also a talented flutist.

And yet, in listening to the collection of tunes he’s put up on MySpace, it’s hard to find anything specifically interesting about his songwriting, his playing or his voice. Don’t get me wrong: None of the songs are bad or anything, they just lack a certain something — a passion, perhaps — and as a result the songs feel a little anemic. Workman is obviously a very experienced and highly talented musician, but the songs themselves seem to come from a professional place, rather than a personal one.

Perhaps it’s the result of being a professional and commercial songwriter, as the songs all sound like songs should, and the lyrics are all perfectly acceptable. Any of these songs could be performed by any number of ballad-enabled country singers, and I could certainly imagine hearing tunes like “Contradiction” on FM radio. And maybe that’s the problem. There’s a certain generic feel to these songs. It’s as if Workman wrote them without any particular voice — including his own — in mind.

That’s not to say that there aren’t well-put together tracks here. All of them are at least at the level of a professional song demo, and some are far better than that. “Don’t worry ’bout me” is a worthy song from a performance perspective, although I’d argue that it would benefit from Workman investing a little bit more of his own passion into the playing. As it stands, it feels like something a group of very skilled session musicians knocked out to sell a song to whoever felt like buying it.

It’s only on instrumental songs like “Summer storm” that we hear a hint of what Workman might actually want to do with his music. It’s a half-synth waltz that provides a solid backing for his flute playing, and it’s the only one of his songs on the page that appear to have his particular talents and style in mind. It’s a bit New Age-y for my tastes, but at least it doesn’t feel mildly generic.

All that said, Workman’s music is good — perhaps even outstanding — by all standard measurements. But, on these recordings at least, it lacks that investment of passion that I personally find so compelling in a performer.

Opening act: Marc Higgins Band

I’m always surprised to see exactly how much talent the Spartanburg music scene has. I’ve known about the existence of the Marc Higgins Band for months — they perform regularly in town — but until today, I hadn’t actually listened to any of their music. In the first ten seconds of the first track, I was astonished that no one had emailed me to say this was a band that I simply had to listen to.

It’s not so much that they are doing anything particularly revolutionary — their sound falls very much within the norms of the alt-country/Americana genre — but rather that they invest their songs with a kind of earnest heart that is deeply appealing. There’s a slight melancholy at work to all of their recordings, perhaps even a darkness here and there, but the songs never manage to fall into the well-worn rut of sad-sackery that so many similar bands tend to find themselves stuck in.

Take a song like “She Never Pretends,” which has a slight indie-rock feel — perhaps a little bit of Bright Eyes here, a little bit of Soul Coughing there — and yet it doesn’t really sound like anything other than the Marc Higgins Band. There’s a stalking, hunting feel to the bassline, offset by an occasional bright, almost hopeful, chorus. And at the center of it all is Higgins’ near-dispassionate, yet still emotionally evocative voice. It’s kind of like listening to a more interesting and lively version of Smog’s Bill Callahan mixed with an Americanized version of Modern English’s Robbie Grey (particularly on songs like “Slow Moving Train”).

But, leaving aside all the references to obscure and not-so-obscure bands that only kind of sound like the Marc Higgins Band does, what I’m getting at is that there’s a richness and an instant familiarity to these songs. They are songs that you think you probably should recognize, even if you can’t place them. That’s a good trait for any band.

There are times that they sound more formula-driven than not, however. The song “Signal” comes to mind, as it sounds very much like any number of alt-country songs by any number of mandolin/harmonica/acoustic-guitar songs by any number of bands that look to No Depression for their cues for artistic credibility. The band’s sound is much more distinct on “Sweet Carolina,” which is stylistically similar to “Signal,” yet feels far less predictable.

If you end up listening to a single track from the band’s MySpace page, I highly encourage “She Never Pretends.” Were I to make a mix-CD from the Spartanburg music scene, this song would definitely make the cut.

Now, it’s your turn. I’ve put my views out here on the digital page, but you can correct, amend, disagree, refute and rebut any and all of it by commenting in the field below. Notice something about the bands that I missed? Write a comment. I’ve had my say, now it’s all about you.