Review: Pluto's Blues by Downhills Home

With its Lynard Skynard guitar riffs and a Creedence guitar solo, Pluto’s Blues threatens to sink into the ever growing country-rock quagmire. However, singer/songwriter Sean McMahon manages to pull the song out of the quicksand by injecting his intelligent lyrics and his unique, quietly passionate vocals.

McMahon, wrote the lyrics in the back corner of the Brass Monkey in Cronulla after doing a sound check. “I was thinking, 'What’s the furthest away anyone could be from here? Pluto? No, Pluto's moon.' That’s where I felt like I was coming from then.”

I’m writing my letters from Pluto’s moon… I’m sending them down on you…

Way down into the neighbourhood…I’m draggin’ down Pluto’s Blues… and hope I’m getting through…Coming down on you… Coming through the deepest black and the deepest blue.

The lyrics to Pluto’s Blues were written years ago but the song never quite worked and the band let it go. “I liked the lyrics but as a song it wasn't doing much for me,” McMahon says. A year or so later the song was suddenly resurrected. “I woke up and the lyrics popped into my head out of the blue and they just sat perfectly over a chord progression I liked.”

Pluto’s Blues does not have the same depth and originality of Sean McMahon’s recent release Welcome to Gippsland but it is a good, solid meat and three veg country rock song with lyrics that’ll make you think.