When you see yourself in the mirror and see someone you have never met staring back at you, it trembles your very soul. Clinton Belcher has been familiar with this terror and in Save Me From Myself he does not just accept it but he goes straight into that terror with no hesitation.
You can sense the burden he is carrying with you, even with the first notes. His voice comes in just over a whisper, it is nearly a scream, it seems to be marshaling every bit of strength to finally utter a truth that he has been fleeing. Then everything transforms. The guitars start to throb with injured intensity, and drums come on like a person smashing his way through a barrier that he has made himself. At that point, you no longer listen to a person but a witness to somebody who is completely naked in front of you.
The strength of this song is that it does not attempt to conceal the roughness. Belcher is using the gospel fire of Jason Crabb and the outlaw honesty of Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash and making it something old and new-soul-old at the same time, a throwback to a time when country music had no qualms about showing its fangs and the truer heavier aspects of human existence.
But what is more genuine is genuineness. Belcher had an absolute creative freedom and recorded all of it in his Oklahoma home studio, and you can breathe that independence with every breath. No committee is softening the blow, no producer putting a convenient shine on. What is left is crude, raw feeling, the voice of a person who has decided to turn his hurt into a source of light to other people who have to deal with their darkness. Save Me From Myself is more than a song to play, more like a sitting, an emotional occasion, and something to remember when the last note is sustained into silence.
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