There’s a Conway, Arkansas artist by the name of Jim Mize. He lands somewhere on the continuum of singer/songwriter and alt-country. He looks like a used car salesman. It’s probably because he was a traveling insurance adjuster, but who am I to judge.
His music sounds of late summer afternoons, the hotter kind, as they bleed into evenings.
Mize’s best may be “Release It To The Sky,” but it’s hard to say, especially since his 2016 work, titled Jim Mize, fits so well as a cohesive and cogent argument for beer joints and honky-tonks.
What he is not is pop music: re-examining where the shit went wrong, no solutions found, the confounding nature of life. His albums are well produced in that there is a hands-off approach, one where the players know their parts, know when to hush, soar high when needed.
Mize makes music for the end of the day, not the beginning. Layabouts need not listen. It takes a tough, tiresome ending to enjoy Mize, the type of hard won piece of low stakes that rewards little, where love is lost and may not return, where the radio provides comfort, a station with no hits.
It’s a shame only a few will have heard Jim Mize. Maybe folks haven’t worked hard enough.
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