(Shout! Factory)

www.shoutfactory.com

The title for Richard Thompson's four-disc box set seems a bit odd, since that particular song was sung by his then-wife Linda Thompson on 1980's Shoot Out the Lights. She completely owned its ache and recrimination, and the quaver in her voice aptly evokes the precarious emotional balance of a high-wire walker or a woman in a tempestuous marriage. Considering their tumultuous relationship and alleged cruelties, "Walking on a Wire" is perhaps not the best summation of Richard's forty-year career in Brit-folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, with Linda as a duo, and as a solo artist, reducing a tragic metaphor to a rather easy pun about guitar strings.

Career-wise, Richard Thompson didn't necessarily walk a wire. Instead, he took enormous strides all over the British Isles, so to speak. As a singer, songwriter, and especially as a guitar player, he traversed genres easily and gracefully, enamored with Celtic folk traditions and American r&b rhythms and unafraid to blend them irreverently. On Thompson's songs, there are no fine lines between sounds and styles; in fact, the joy of sitting down with Walking on a Wire is in hearing the ways he blurs the distinctions. On the early cut "Roll Over Vaughn Williams," Thompson bends his notes to sound like a bagpipe, and "Valerie" kicks off with a Sun Records guitar lick, then morphs into a gig, then nearly falls apart before Thompson stitches everything back together with a short, strange solo.

While most of his 60s contemporaries came to rock via blues and favored an ostentatious playing style that always let you know when they were soloing, Thompson approaches rock through a folk tradition, which gives his playing much more variety and modesty. He may never have achieved the rock-god status of Clapton or Page, but he has a lot more tricks up his sleeve. Although it lacks some of his notorious cameos (on albums by John Martyn, John Cale, Nick Drake, and Michael Doucet), Walking on a Wire ably shows the breadth of his guitar playing, which grew with every album. The picking on the gorgeous "Waltzing's for Dreamers" is eloquent and restrained, but while the electric noodling on "Main Title from Grizzly Man" (from the excellent Werner Herzog doc) manages to be both pensive and majestic.

As a singer and songwriter, Thompson is equally witty and inventive, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of metaphors for crumbling marriages, cracked worldviews, and middle-aged ennui. And he sings them in a sharp, deep tenor that can sound hurt and hurtful at once, acidulously sarcastic or intensely sorrowful.  The primary accomplishment of this set is not only presenting all three sides of the musician, but weighting them equally, as if the singing, songwriting, and guitar playing all fed each other and without one, the remaining two would suffer irrevocably. Thompson didn't walk on a wire, but on three at once.

STANDOUT TRACKS: "The Angels Took My Racehorse Away," "The Calvary Cross," "Walking on a Wire," "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Cooksferry Queen" STEPHEN M. DEUSNER