The Chicago-born and Austin-raised Friedman, who died at the age of 79 in June 2024, was incapable of making anything that wasn’t laced with his trademark wit.
Indeed, of the multitude of disciplines he undertook during his life, a keen satirical sense was always close at hand, and so it is with his final album, the posthumous Poet of Motel 6, which dropped March 21 on Hardcharger Records.
Breezy at just over a half hour in length, Friedman recorded these 10 songs, his first new work in six years, over the course of the spring of 2023, working with producer David Mansfield (a veteran of Bob Dylan’s mid-1970s Rolling Thunder Revue, and recent tour-mate of T Bone Burnett’s) and accommodating Friedman's then-recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
“Kinky and I met in Austin at a friend of his,” Mansfield said in press materials. “We spent a few days just going over the songs. ... Kinky was already experiencing moderate cognitive issues at that point, so I came up with a technique I thought would work. It was just the two of us and Kinky did not play guitar. We were facing each other in comfortable easy chairs with a glass in-between, and I played and accompanied him.
“If he started getting lost, I’d throw him a line. If he did something quirky in his phrasing, I would follow him like a hawk. ... I kept a ledger of what we had and didn’t have, and kept doing takes until I knew we had enough to piece something together. Then I took it all back to my studio in New Jersey and spent a good while editing and turning it into a performance.”
It's no faint praise to say that Mansfield has made the entire project seem utterly seamless — anyone coming to this record cold would be hard-pressed to tell anything was amiss with its creator. There is a faintly defiant sense of liveliness coursing through these songs; Friedman’s vocals, thin at times, sound remarkably robust, given the circumstances.
A Freed Man
Yet the ample doses of humor — the wrenching title track, a tribute to his dear friend Billy Joe Shaver, ends with a mischievous intonation from God — are subdued by the almost overwhelming poignancy of songs such as “Banjo, Sophie and Me,” which finds Friedman singing lovingly of his deceased pets, or the gorgeous “Hummingbird Lanai,” where Friedman sings of awaiting a new love.Such subject matter and the finality of Friedman’s situation might make it seem as though Poet of Motel 6 was conceived with the end in mind. Mansfield dismisses that framing.
“There might have been times when [Kinky] feared it might be his last hurrah, but he still talked about other things he wanted to do, musical and literary,” Mansfield said in press materials.
Friedman is backed, at various points, by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rodney Crowell, Rick Trevino and Amy Nelson, all of whom sang harmony vocals at Austin’s Arlyn Studios, with Friedman on hand. In that sense, Poet of Motel 6, lively with flourishes of mariachi and folk music, plays a bit like an elegy for a time and a town which exists now only in memory.
They don’t make ‘em like Kinky anymore.
“This record is as good as Kinky’s [1973 debut] Sold American,” said Friedman’s sister Marcie in press materials. “I think it’s as good as anything he’s ever written. And I, sister helping my brother, I missed the point that every song on this record is about saying goodbye. I don’t know why. They’re all beautiful songs and they say it in different ways. I finally realized that — a little too late.”
