Life doesn’t get much harder than losing your wife, partner, best friend and mother of your children to a fatal illness.
That’s what veteran hard-blues man Mike Zito was facing when he stared down the prospect of making a new album—an album that his wife Laura, diagnosed with terminal cancer, encouraged him to make, knowing all the time that she would likely never hear the finished record. The end result—Zito’s new album Life Is Hard—would be compelling just for that backstory, but what matters more here is that Zito clearly poured himself into this music, delivering one fully committed, emotionally searing performance after another.
Zito’s guitar-driven hard blues has always owed a lot to his fellow Texan Stevie Ray Vaughan—the bold, stinging guitar licks, the twangy, urgent vocals, and the rich rhythmic bed underlying it all. This time around Zito goes right to the source, with Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Wynans sitting in to deliver rich Hammond accents and playful honky-tonk piano that’s as authentic as it gets. With the tight rhythm section of Calvin Turner (bass) and Lamar Carter (drums) alternating between a heavy churn and flat-out boogie, and co-producers Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith providing additional guitar, it’s a powerhouse of a band.
The surprisingly rangy track list on this album matches a pair of compelling Zito originals with an eclectic mix of covers spanning classic blues and roots music, rock and soul. What the songs all share is a topical set of themes—love and loss and getting right with your higher power—and the way Zito (who once memorably covered Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” as an acoustic blues) recasts each song in his distinctive style.
Opener “Lonely Man” (a Little Milton number) drives hard with Wynans delivering ringing Hammond licks as Zito’s guitar pushes the dials into the red. The title track is a deliberately paced traditional blues by Fred James, and then Zito and company transform Stevie Wonder’s “Have A Talk With God” into a strutting r&b workout lit up by gang vocals on the chorus.
Batting cleanup, Zito’s self-penned “Forever My Love” is a slow-burning, sky-hugging tribute to his late wife Laura that’s as powerful and heartfelt as any of its kind I’ve ever heard. It’s hard to imagine anything following it, but like life for those left behind, the album does go on.
Highlights the rest of the way include an exuberant run at country-blues nugget “No One To Talk To (But The Blues)” (a hit for Lefty Frizzell), a transformative take on the Guess Who’s “These Eyes,” a grinding stroll through Tab Benoit’s “Darkness,” and a positively haunting reading of Reverend Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” The second Zito original, “Without Loving You,” is a shimmery strut that celebrates the love he shared with Laura for so many years while asking “What am I gonna do / With all this love I have for you?”
There are many ways a person can face and process grief; the only wrong way to do it is to try not to. You can’t. Laura passed in July 2023, surrounded by her family. Mike Zito met his grief head-on, pouring his emotions into these recordings and delivering one of the best albums of his considerable career. Life Is Hard, but albums like this one can make its toughest moments into a kind of celebration: of perseverance, and resilience, and love.