What makes this wonderful album especially delightful is the way this son of Texas has turned his attention east toward Appalachia. You'll swear that Edgar Meyer was beside Guy Clark as he wrote these beautiful melodies. And I'll be damned if there are no cellos on this record; something is making those soulful, hollow sounds. On top of it all, Clark has written a pocketful of witty and clever lyrics. Guy Clark is an American treasure; Cold Dog Soup is another gem for the chest.

Although this album sounds great thanks to his stellar sidemen, the songs lack the focus of Boats to Build or Old No. 1. The title track is razor sharp, but the album falls too often into fuzzy sentimentality (Sis Draper and Indian Head Penny)and ends up sounding too precious. The cover of Steve Earle's Ft. Worth Blues is solid if unexciting. The album comes off sounding less like a cohesive work and more like a one-off done with friends-- which has it's definite charms but this batch of songs just lacks the distinctive character and earthy bite of his earlier work (including the superior Dublin Blues.) Buy this one to complete the collection but, coming from a fan and slavish admirer, I think it's a little weak. The problem with being Guy Clark is that the bar is just so impossibly high.....

Because I do a folk music show on public radio, I listen to a lot of music. Some weeks, I receive more than 60 cds to preview to play on the air. Most of the time, I listen to them once. "Stone Dog Soup" is one that I want to hear again and again. Between Guy Clark's exquisite writing style, his exceptional musician friends, and his outstanding taste in choosing music that he hasn't written to interpret for the listeners, this cd is worth the price of admission. The wide range of styles--from the title cut to "Sis Draper"--brings Guy Clark alive into your living room or the cd player in your car. After hearing this one, it was difficult to move on to the many others I needed to preview. Now I'm buying two more for friends. This is, as they say in Texas, a good 'un. Make that a great 'un. Do your holiday shopping early, and put Guy Clark at the top of the list!

This album grows like wild yesterdays and thinking about how it feels to get old. Like good homemade salsa or chile it is better the next day. The title cut is full of the self-same "hillbilly haiku" that has made Guy Clark a favorite since the first time I heard him at back in the 70s. Yeah man get up and rhyme and tell them how you feel and the ghosts of the poets may sing along. It seems a long way from Kerrville/Austin/Ft.Worth to the Mission District but cold dog soup and rainbow pie makes the trip a little easier for all of us.

Guy Clark's country roots and West Texas idiom are so disarming that a casual listener might miss the sly literate quality of his songs. Who else gets away with talking about William Butler Yeats and Townes Van Zandt in the same breath? Clark has a poet's instincts and a sense of image unsurpassed by his contemporaries, most of whom are numbered among his admirers. And there is no finer side man around than Verlon Thompson, whose picking is as clean and fresh as a summer morning. God bless this music.