There’s a clever brilliance to the title and cover art of Brian Dunne’s latest record, Clams Casino.
The scene is simple yet striking: Dunne sits alone at a table in an Italian restaurant, framed by walls of celebrity portraits, with a comically oversized bowl of spaghetti stacked high before him.
He meets the camera with a deadpan stare, an image that teases a tongue-in-cheek humor running through the album. It’s a fitting choice, since Dunne’s sharp, witty songwriting easily holds its own alongside masters like John Prine, Todd Snider, and Hayes Carll.
But the sentiment also belies the other side of Dunne’s music; songs here that tackle disappointment, rejection, self-doubt, and isolation. It’s that duality of Dunne’s work…