Mike Zito

Life Is Hard

(Gulf Coast Records)

Deeply personal tragedy has prompted Mike Zito to paint his masterpiece, the emotion of the loss of his wife to cancer last year shaping the twelve best performances of his life, by far. Awful how that happens, the impetus of real blues affecting an artist’s work. But Zito’s catharsis becomes reward for the rest of us. Simply titled Life is Hard, Mike Zito’s latest album features nothing simple at all. Variety-packed, it moves through rockers, rollers, heart rending soul, and several kinds of blues. As produced with typical excellence by Joe Bonamassa and his guitar partner Josh Smith, the album features both guitarists supporting and urging Zito to sing and play guitar with uncommon natural finesse. With the remainder of Bonamassa’s band—keyboardist Reese Wynans, bassist Calvin Turner, and drummer Lamar Carter—and several guests providing magnificent propulsion, the album never lets up in delivering top-flight blues-rock entertainment.

Opening with a hard charging take on Little Milton’s “Lonely Man,” Zito cries out about his love and his loneliness in a hearty voice and with particularly stinging guitar licks, setting up recurring themes of love and loss that change in pace throughout the album. Fred James’s “Life is Hard” turns a tired phrase (Life is hard, and then you die) into a burning blues, Zito growling out the feeling as the band takes the intense melody to the brink. Continuing in that thread, Stevie Wonder’s “Have a Talk with God” advises on what to do “When you feel your life’s too hard.” Zito and the band commence to making that tune over into a veritable soul-blues classic here. Moving and heartening, it features some of Zito’s most tasteful guitar playing captured on record to date.

Zito also chose appropriate, excellent songs by his fellow, blues-rooted guitarists Tinsley Ellis, Tab Benoit, and Walter Trout, among others, to compliment his own “Forever My Love” and “Without Loving You,” the former a blues ballad so blistering and mournful in recital that a listener could almost feel like an interloper to a private moment. To lighten things up, he folds in a perfectly sunny take on the old Guess Who classic, “These Eyes,” in wonderful tribute to his wife.

Performed and produced with outstanding professionalism, Zito worked his pain and grief and achieved the best possible outcome. He said: “My wife Laura and I planned this idea of pouring my heart out in music after her death from cancer. Joe, Josh, and the incredible musicians were fully aware of the task at hand. They brought a lot of emotion to the music. I am so proud of this album, and I know Laura would be proud as well.” Amen to that.

 Tom Clarke for MAS

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