The great man from Mannford, OK, has terminal cancer. It's impossible to listen to Cake or Death without this news in mind. Not that Hazlewood himself succumbs to lachrymosity; he's as mordant, acute and self-deflating as ever. Witness Fred Freud, a skittish waltz, with interjections from Mozart and Bach, over which he intones a psychiatrist's advice ("No kisses or posies can cure your neuroses").
Or Baghdad Knights, which dispenses, in utterly Hazlewoodian fashion, with considerations of genre, setting a biting war critique to music best described as big-band/cop-show-theme/blues-rock fusion. On The First Song of the Day, he's matched for gravelly gravitas by Bela B. And his best-known songs, Boots and Some Velvet Morning, are revisited, the first with Duane Eddy in its original arrangement, the second, movingly, by his granddaughter. As an album, it's stunning. As a farewell, it's humbling.
BPX