July, 2007
Beaver Nelson's Exciting Opportunity CD Review
By Gilbert Garcia, San Antonio Current, July 18

It might be a stretch to say that house painting saved Beaver Nelson's musical career, but it certainly kick-started the creation of his latest album.

Struggling to reactivate his muse after the birth of his daughter left him too preoccupied with parental duties to write songs, Nelson took a gig painting four lake houses, and for 10 solid weeks he had the kind of solitude that songwriters dream about.

The result of all that thinking time is Exciting Opportunity, the Austin troubadour's latest collection of self-deprecating revelations and homespun philosophy. Nelson's voice is almost eerily similar to that of Michael Penn, and his easygoing, mid-tempo rockers recall a period in the early-to-mid-'90s when adult-alternative was not an insulting term, when people such as Penn and Freedy Johnston made mature, literate, carefully crafted music that was too darkly realistic to be accused of wimpiness.

Nelson cultivates a vaguely goofball charm, but his themes are the serious concerns of a family man with career anxiety, too old to have any illusions but too young to give up his search for a touch of magic. One of his best moments on Exciting Opportunity comes with "If You Name A Thing It Dies," in which he comes to grips with the fact that his job—identifying and defining his own feelings, in three-minute song form—inevitably kills those ineffable moments that need to be left alone.

Nelson's effortless way with a hook and a jangly groove reveals itself on "Lord of All That I Survey" and "Overnight Sensation." These songs feel so casual, so devoid of fussiness, that you figure Nelson could write them while napping in a hammock. But that ease is deceptive. After all, we know for a fact that it took an extended house-painting assignment to get these songs out.