The late Rodd Keith remains one of the greatest and most daring and inventive songwriters of the 20^th century. Primarily known as the most prodigious of song-poem stylists, he worked for some of the best known companies supplying customers with a service that would set their own lyrics to music. His discovery of psychedelics in the late 60s/early 70s succeeded in extending his vision even further, resulting in an unquantifiable corpus of work that is as goofy, surreal and quintessentially American as the lyrics he brought to life. Due to the nature of the business, Keith had to work fast and turn around his creations in no time at all and he developed a feel for speed-of-thought inspiration that is the equal of any great improviser. This is the second collection of work from Keith put together by Roaratorio and it is simply beautiful. All tracks are previously unreissued and they run the gamut of cracked real people vision, from the patriotism on pills of “Search Out Your Soul, American” through to low-rent gospel evangelising (“O Jesus My Saviour” – Keith has a brief parallel career as a musical evangelist), an inspired take on “Choo Choo Train”, beautiful 60s psych-pop (“Deep Velvet”), acid soul, weird suburban easy, hallucinatory folk rock... and that’s not to mention the uniformly bats lyrics, with Keith somehow squozing the clumsiest of couplets and oddest meters into impossibly concise shapes. Despite the cheap, commercial trappings of the biz Keith has a lot of soul and every performance feels valedictory. If you’re at all attuned to the very specific vibrations of the Real People genre and if you dig 20th century American culture at its most out-of-whack then you will swoon over this, another peerless collection of the works of one of the true American originals and a visionary musical talent. Can’t get enough of this. Comes with a free download and liner notes from song-poem vocalist Dick Kent. Highly recommended!