"There is no rock & roll on this set, and there aren't any folk songs either. It's pretty much a honky tonk record in the Merle Haggard vein, with a voice equally influenced by the West Coast folk-rock sound ... In particular, "Seven Bridges Road" and "Montgomery in the Rain" offer a writer who has taken everyone from Thomas Wolfe to Hank Williams and turned them into something completely his own: prosaic, profound, and scathingly original. This is a bona fide masterpiece".