He’s a clever bloke that Barnesy.

Jimmy Barnes has been producing some of this country’s most striking and powerful vocal performances since the early 70s and you’d figure at some point his poor vocal chords would give up the ghost.

Not so with Barnesy!  He continues to produce some musical gems and his most recent production called My Criminal Record is no exception.

Released in 2019 just prior to the pandemic, My Criminal Record is especially clever for a couple of reasons.

The first of which is Barnesy continues to mature with his audience.  His song writing, his collaborations and the song production all continue to mature and appeal to his long-term audience.

Jimmy has once again teamed-up with arguably Australia’s greatest ever songwriter and lyricists, Don Walker, to produce gems like Stolen Car parts one and two, as well as the title track, My Criminal Record.

Secondly, the song production continues to have great energy while also protecting Jimmy’s voice by clipping the extremities of the vocal performance.

Tracks like I Won’t Let Down written by Chris Cheney of Living End and Shutting Down Our Town written by Troy Cassar-Daley are both beautifully crisp and instant pop/rock classics.

You’ll notice in a few of the songs, Jimmy has also cleverly introduced his daughters as backing vocalists which can add some vocal depth as well as add an octave or more to the vocal through very sharp harmonies.

This is nothing new for aging rockers and it’s exactly what Bruce Springsteen did years ago when Patty Scialfa join the E Street Band in the late 70s. Bruce Springsteen said at the time it was great to have Patty in the band to be able to ‘hit those high notes every night.’

Since Jimmy has hit 65, vocal chord self-preservation is undoubtably a good idea although this bit of caution takes absolutely nothing away from his live performance.

We saw Barnesy a little while back at a street festival at the end of Caville Avenue on the Gold Coast and he was an absolute sensation.

He still brings this electricity to his performances and retains this unique sense of volatility which I suspect he has cultivated since in the early days of Cold Chisel.

Contrast that with Bruce Springsteen who we saw at the AAMI Park stadium in Melbourne not long after seeing Barnsey in GC, and while The Boss delivered some of the greatest rock songs ever written, he simply lacked the same electricity which Jimmy brings.

Now that we are starting to move on from the pandemic, fingers crossed we can start to see a little more of Barnesy in the months ahead.

If you’re going to Bluefest in Byron Bay this weekend, you’ll see Jimmy on Sunday and then he’s going to criss-cross the country for a few more gigs between now and October.

If you get the opportunity to see him, he won’t let you down.

My Criminal Record – great album, Jimmy.

Three out of five guitars.