Every songwriter has a specialty: some excel at communicating love, others lust, still others the blues. With his sophomore CD Back Home, Steve Kunzman emerges as an expert in rendering the essence of home as restorative power, as light in the distance and light in the heart. With two-time Grammy-winning producer Ben Wisch (Marc Cohn, Patty Larkin, Peter Wolf) and some top flight musicians, . Nine years have passed since Steve's 2003 debut Find The Moon. Find The Moon came after years spent making music, and several tenures as a student in a songwriting workshop led by Rosanne Cash. (Cash calls Steve's work "totally original and beautifully honest.") Over the ensuing near-decade - a blip of time for a father of four like Steve - music and songwriting remained integral to his life, but he focused on family and his environmental law practice. The opportunity to finally commit the resulting richness to CD, and the wherewithal to follow through, coincided not long after he and his wife sent the last of their brood off to college. Enter Ben Wisch, who gently urged Steve to make the leap, to invest his resources in himself, to be an artist. Steve agreed. Wisch, an acclaimed pianist, called in bassist Zev Katz (Hall & Oates, Kris Kristofferson), drummer Chris Marshak (Steve Winwood) guitarist-banjoist-dobro-ist Kevin Barry (Lucy Kaplansky, Ray LaMontagne) and violinist-vocalist Elana Arian (Dirty Projectors). With Wisch at the helm, this ensemble fleshed out Steve's acoustic guitar and burnished vocal based tunes, offering groove and atmospherics to the yearning title track, sly rhythmic underpinnings to the darkly comic Tom Waits-esque "Another Fine Day," and an Afro-Cuban feel to the shadowy "About To Disappear." While Back Home's sawdust-on-the-floor treatments of "Lucy Brown" and "Coffee Every Day" honor Steve's years playing in bars, this album gives equal time to the shelter one seeks not only from honky-tonkin', but from the inevitable slings and arrows of life. Ballads "To the Edge of the Sea" and "Canadian Winds" glow with love beyond romance, radiating heartfelt strength given and received in the face of challenges. But every man needs a bouquet-of-roses tune, and for that, country-standard-sounding "Sweet Dreams" is valentine perfection. Bookending the tracklist are songs in which a narrator is either heading home - the title track - or longing for home lost - "Man Without a Home"; neither of these guys is Steve Kunzman, but for the grace of music, they could have been. Thanks to a well-worn guitar, songs, and family, he's the man behind Back Home, a collection shining like a porch light in the darkness.
