Kate Campbell with Spooner Oldham

For the Living of These Days
Large River Music

For a deliberatively collaborative effort, Kate Campbell’s latest record is quite stripped down, quite minimal if not in scope then in sound.

“For the Living of These Days” is an Alabama-recorded collection. It is also a collaboration with the some of the best of the state’s musical heritage, namely the city of Muscle Shoals and those who made it what it is to the music world.

Like a drawling and more soulful Sarah McLachlan, Kate Campbell and key­boardist Spooner Oldham — a Muscle Shoals native — have parented a beaming child of an album obedient to the sonic traditions that keep the South artfully and aesthetically eternal in our imaginations.

With almost every song focusing on Jesus, the lyrics on most of the tracks — including covers of Kris Kristofferson and Mylon Le Fevre and setting the “Prayer of Thomas Merton” to music — reveal Campbell as the female counterpart to a saved Bob Dylan.