Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK:
Exploding Star: Heather Maloney
The music Heather Maloney created in the aftermath of her father’s death during the pandemic was meant as a healing exercise, to ease private pain. We can thank her family for convincing her to go public. Exploding Star, the title track of the Northampton, Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter’s ninth studio album, is our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. An outpouring of latent love.
Maloney’s most intimate and vulnerable collection of songs will be released on January 31, five years after her last full-length offering. She told PopMatters in a wide-ranging interview: ‘It was such a disorienting time on multiple levels, so it took me a long time to reorient myself enough to string any words together that captured what I was going through. I think it was almost a year before I wrote the first song for Exploding Star. After that it was like the floodgates had opened because the rest came relatively quickly.’ An explosion of creativity.
Maloney had finally found the courage to pay homage to her father who passed away after a battle with Parkinson’s in 2021. ‘I wasn’t trying to prove anything this time around; I didn’t care about writing the greatest hook possible or the most clever chord change or lyric. I was just trying to navigate this painful and profound thing we all go through but don’t talk about nearly enough: grief.
‘In my experience, when you go through grief, not only do you lose someone you held dear, you also lose yourself. You lose who you were before they died and the world as you knew it – with them in it. I was actively putting myself back together at this time in my life. Songwriting was something I leaned on heavily to get me through it.’
The title song is almost stream of consciousness save for the space generated by its glorious refrain: ‘I emptied out your house/ Like a slow exploding star/ I scattered you around/ And now you’re all spread out.’ Her collaborators, producer Don Mitchell, Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot from High Tea, and Reed Sutherland were responsible for the lovely harmonies we hear on this track and elsewhere. There are strains of Mitchell’s indie folk band Darlingside in the divine vocals (Maloney teamed up with them for her Woodstock EP in 2014) and he also contributes guitars, keyboards and banjo.
During the planning stage of the album Maloney discovered that her family home in the New Jersey countryside, in Sandyston near the Pennsylvania border, was abandoned and vacant; it became a time capsule transporting her back to the mid-90s. Maloney, Mitchell and company packed a van with equipment and a two-day recording session was staged there.
‘That house is the backdrop to so many moments with my father that became song lyrics on the record, so having the house itself be a part of a few songs was such a beautiful and intense experience for me. At times I felt that my dad was still somewhere in the house, and I was singing directly to him. At other times it felt like I was surrounded by all of our young and distant ghosts.’
Should I be looking for your message in cloud shapes, snowflakes?
Eyes to the sky for some omen
Golden light to warm your empty chair
A song for the heavy air
Coincidence? Significance?
To believe you’re there
Is it you, is it me, injecting it with meaning?
Does it matter when the matter that we’re made of is the same
I’ll just wait, I’m just space with a few sad cells
That take shape of a person
Without their person
In this unfathomable place
‘I can’t find words for the level of nostalgia I felt just walking through the front door for the first time since exiting about 30 years ago. I just felt so utterly steeped in memories down to my bones like no time had passed at all. My dad was a carpenter and my mom is super-handy, so they’d actually done a major renovation on it.
‘Every floorboard and tile and light fixture they’d put in with their hands was still exactly how they’d put it. I even lifted the corner of a carpet to find one of my dad’s chewed-up construction pencils (he always had one behind an ear). Our recording session was intense but also so healing and cathartic. Singing in that empty house felt like the most direct way I could pay tribute to our memories. I felt lighter when I left. It was a total gift.’
Maloney, 39, even used her dad’s old guitar and the keyboard/synth she started playing as a youngster before she learned guitar. Two tracks, Leave It to Them and Nightbloomer NJ, were recorded there; even some percussion was played on the floors and walls of the house. She still sees her father everywhere…
Are you woven in the fabric of my everyday living?
Maloney’s parents had divorced when she was six or seven. She and her artist mum stayed in New Jersey while dad and her older brother moved to Florida. ‘Dad came to every show he could within driving distance of where he lived, and even when his Parkinson’s had gotten pretty bad, he flew up to a show to surprise me. He Kickstarted my albums and always asked if I needed help. He maintained a shrine-like music shelf and wall with all of my posters, newspaper clippings, backstage passes, and anything else he’d ask me to save for him. I miss saving things for him.’
Maloney has been supported by friends and family as well as therapy, connecting with peers who have also lost a parent, and has leaned on the power of meditation and Zen parables she has long practised. She feels privileged that her empathetic songs, including her latest single from the forthcoming album, Light You Leave Behind, have reduced audiences to tears. Dad would be touched too, and proud. She has honoured his memory beautifully.
The Tunnel: Lori McKenna (featuring Stephen Wilson Jr)
There is only one thing better than a Lori McKenna song she wrote for someone else and that is a song performed by her. The Tunnel, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, may yet be covered by Nashville’s finest but her version will not be surpassed.
The prolific McKenna writes touchingly about the travails of small-town American family life: universal themes, home truths and nothing but truth. The Tunnel, which appeared on her brilliant album 1988 last year, has been given fresh lustre as a new single, with supplementary vocals from Stephen Wilson Jr who co-wrote the track along with Ben West.
McKenna’s songs have been recorded by the great and the very good: Taylor Swift and Chris Stapleton (I Bet You Think About Me), Faith Hill and husband Tim McGraw, Little Big Town (Girl Crush), Miranda Lambert, Maren Morris, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, The Highwomen and Keith Urban. She has collaborated with some of those artists too, as well as with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey, her friends in the trio Love Junkies. Hill recorded three songs, including Stealing Kisses, from McKenna’s 2004 album Bittertown which led to a publishing deal. Little wonder she is often described as the songwriters’ songwriter.
Her latest exercise with Wilson and West was particularly fruitful. She told the country, Americana and roots magazine Holler: ‘The song came from growing up with people that live down the street, and looking back at some of those who are still struggling; it’s one struggle after another. Why has my journey been different? Why did I get to be lucky? It popped into my head that sometimes life is mostly the tunnel for people.
‘I remembered that down the street from my house, there was this tunnel underneath the road that took a brook from one side of the road to the other. Kids used to dare each other to go across, and I only got about four steps before I ran out the other way, I never had the guts to do it. Then I thought of all the crazy things you do in middle school when you’re a kid and brought that idea to Ben and Stephen, who said they’d been trying to say this for a long time. So we figured it out together.’
The Tunnel begins in characteristic storyteller fashion, McKenna’s affecting vocal painting a picture of the swirling song’s homespun backdrop before she navigates the emotional struggle:
Near the old folk’s home, past Page Street and Ash
That patch of woods next to the pink laundromat…
Yeah, you can’t get out the same way you came in
Still think like a kid when everything changes
Those walls could’ve caved in any second and blacked out the blue
And I wanted to save you, but I just did nothing
Prayed the shape of the end takes the afternoon sun in
I don’t know how it works or how God picks who gets through
It just seems like a lot of life’s been mostly the tunnel for you
‘I feel I’m a positive person, but I do like sad songs, and never saw the light. It was Stephen who said: when we get to that point in the song, just say there’s a light at the end, keep running, give them the light. I wouldn’t have done that by myself, to be honest. It was a good day writing with those guys.’
I bet the road heading South is somebody’s North
Just like somebody’s darkness is somebody’s torch
There’s a light at the end, a light at the end, keep on running
There’s a light at the end, I promise my friend, it’s coming
There’s a light at the end, a light at the end
We are fortunate one of the industry’s most in-demand songwriters, in her mid-fifties and in her prime, managed to hold on to some of her best work. 1988 is named after the year she married her childhood beau Gene and features co-writes with two of her sons, Chris and Brian. The title track recalls those innocent, ignorant days: ‘We were too dumb to know we didn’t know anything/ And too young for making those plans.’ It is a love letter to her husband and five children and their sacrifices: ‘Overtime and bills we couldn’t pay/ One on the hip and one on the way.’ She has a gift for engaging melodies and making poetry out of the prosaic and everyday.
McKenna says that every time she writes, she hears ballads, so she asked Dave Cobb, who produced earlier impressive albums The Bird And The Rifle, The Tree and The Balladeer, to evoke a 90s rock vibe, which was achieved thanks in part to Cobb’s own electric guitar work. Her 12th album was recorded in Cobb’s new studio in his house on a tiny island off the cost of Savannah. She still lives in her home town of Stoughton, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, collaborating by Zoom as she did during the pandemic. Beam me up, Nashville.
The beautifully dark Town in Your Heart (co-penned with Jessie Jo Dillon and Dustin Christensen) tells of a brother who escaped and one who succumbed – ‘And I’d go back if I had my way, and I’d make/ Those demons that were haunting you wish they had never tried.’ A sister song of The Tunnel, a cautionary tale of how small-town life suits some such as the track’s author but devours others, and the heart-breaking Wonder Drug, a meditation on opioid addiction and her desperate wish that love had been the drug that gripped them.
Humble And Kind, a ‘lullaby, guidebook and tribute’ to her children from 2017’s The Bird And The Rifle and a hit the year before for Tim McGraw, won one of her many Grammys. Town In Your Heart, 1988, Wonder Drug and The Tunnel rival that classic for powerful, compassionate writing. We are grateful she kept those compositions for herself. Well, until another song-seeker comes calling.
Amen Anyway: Amy Helm
Amy Helm describes Amen Anyway, a standout cut from her fourth full album Silver City, as the truest prayer she knows. The achingly soulful track, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, represents a celebration of female power to move forward in the face of adversity.
The daughter of the late Levon Helm packs as much emotion into her voice as her father did with The Band. ‘Amen Anyway is about being paralysed with the fear of not being good enough and lacking faith in ourselves,’ she explains. ‘It’s also about being surrounded by people who handle that with drugs and alcohol – it’s about losing people to that, and still finding the strength to say Amen to life.’
On the album, skilfully produced by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman and recorded at the Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, Helm explores themes of loss, desperation and fear. She says she was guided by women’s voices: ‘Women whispering, singing, shouting their stories – speaking the truth. I wanted to dig into that inherited narrative and reach for what I could.’
Silver City fuses the folk and blues soundtrack of her childhood with gospel and soul, drawing inspiration from varied stories of womanhood and its complexities: the ordeal of Helm’s great-grandmother, the story of a young fan struggling with substance abuse, her own life as a single mother and touring singer. Kaufman, who contributes guitar, bass and keyboards, frames the songs around Helm’s vibrant vocals with the subtle adornment of horns and harmonies.
Helm began the creative process for Silver City reminiscing about a young fan named Katie who died from an overdose. While that story did not make the cut, its theme of human frailty provided inspiration for the haunting Amen Anyway.
Amazing Grace was that you by the river
Methadone and hand guns in the car
Were you in the back seat when I called out for a favour
Behind that Colbert County, Alabama bar
Were you with me on stage
When I walked out on the chorus
As the band played Shake A Hand, that old gospel song
Were You in my motel room
On the outskirts of Memphis
When I knew I had to mean it or move on
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, amen anyway
Hallelujah, hallelujah, amen anyway
She is paying homage to an old boyfriend who died too young, allowing the heart-tugging line about angels to ambush us in the final verse:
Amazing Grace was that you in December
In the eyes of that young stranger who did not have a home
In the voice of my love before he OD’d in Atlanta
Who told me angels have to learn to sing alone
If I Was King, a partly fictionalised narrative about Helm’s great-grandmother, is close to Helm’s heart. ‘Her story was lost to the family. They were dirt poor sharecroppers and she started having kids when she was 14. She had married this fire-and-brimstone preacher, who banished her from home and from her children.’ Helm wrote it as a meditation on the way women have long been told by someone else how to live their lives. She thus began to see the album as a series of letters: ‘All of these songs were me speaking to somebody – either reaching out and asking questions, or asking them to reach back to me.’
Certain songs address the realities of her immediate family. ‘The title track was painful to write, about the grief of divorce. I don’t think I could have written that song until I was way on the other side of it. I have a really healthy, lovely blended family and my ex-husband is a really dear friend of mine now. It’s a very cool thing that we all worked hard at.’ You can hear the lump in her throat.
Helm’s gospel-soaked voice is equally affecting on Money On 7, Baby Come Back, Hwy 81 and Mt. Guardian. The latter is a stirring study of the successes and failures of single parenting. ‘I was by myself for upwards of 10 years, running myself ragged on the road, getting home at three in the morning and grabbing a box of mac and cheese from the gas station for the next night’s dinner, waking up at seven and doing it again. I felt victorious any time I got my kids to school on time with lunch in hand. When I look back on that now, it was such a beautiful time, but also hectic and intense. I think: How the hell did I even do that? This whole record is about different ways that I’ve tried to keep pressing on.’
Helm shares the lessons of a remarkable life as an artist, mother, daughter, woman, as someone for whom perseverance is an abiding attribute. ‘No one talks about the beauty of age. Shame and fear are so common to so many of us, and to get through that and feel ourselves change is the most beautiful thing about getting older. It’s incredible to look back at things and celebrate how we’ve survived.’
Helm continues to stage the annual Dirt Farmer Festival and the monthly Midnight Rambles at the Woodstock studios. Levon’s legacy is in loving hands.
The Poacher: Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance
From the stage of The Sound Lounge in Sutton, Surrey, Slim Chance bass player Steve Bingham reminded us it was the 50th anniversary of the release of The Poacher, one of Ronnie Lane’s greatest songs. Then the band launched into that delightful, essentially English folksy intro, and the memories of their beloved late friend cascaded down Ronnie Lane.
The Poacher, which first appeared on his 1974 debut solo album Anymore For Anymore, seemed to symbolise Lane’s retreat from his native London and the music business, which he had come to despise. The man who founded the Small Faces with Steve Marriott in 1965 and was joined four years later by new faces (Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart) in the abbreviated Faces meets a lone woodland traveller in the song, a reflection of his would-be self. Lane is relishing a simpler bucolic life, eschewing the glitz and plying his poetry in a melodic masterpiece...
There stood this old timer
For all the world’s first poacher
His mind upon his tackle
And these words upon his mind:
Bring me fish with eyes of jewels
And mirrors on their bodies
Bring them strong and bring them bigger
Than a newborn child
The east Londoner had set up home in a remote 100-acre farm and smallholding in Fishpool Farm, described in the book accompanying the 2019 box-set Just For A Moment as ‘situated a few fields into Wales off the Shrewsbury to Bishop’s Castle road in the hamlet of Hyssington’. It was variously described as being in Montgomeryshire, Powys and Shropshire. Such was his restless spirit – ‘I like to be a stranger’.
‘Ronnie really dropped out,’ says Bingham, who played in the original Slim Chance and is part of the line-up that hooked up again in 2010 and remain a tribute band to themselves and those left behind. ‘He and his wife, Kate, embraced the whole cosmic gypsy look. What a mischievous geezer and wind-up merchant he was.’
At the farm, this pre-Glastonbury troubadour reared sheep, even attending a course on it at a local agricultural college, and planted barley (for wine-making purposes, naturally), Lane out front on a tractor and his great friend Charlie Hart riding behind and scattering the seeds. At night they might drink in the Miners’ Arms; The Who’s Pete Townshend would gravitate towards the pub’s piano when visiting.
Sometimes the band recorded in the open air – at the end of one track you could hear a neighbouring farmer asking if he’d seen a lost sheep of his – and also in the barn. ‘A dog or a duck might wander in,’ says Bingham. ‘Didn’t matter.’ The ‘hobobilly’ tracks of Anymore For Anymore were laid down in Lane’s mobile studio, a rare shrewd investment, and co-produced by Glyn Johns.
Bingham describes The Poacher as ‘a song to make the hairs on your neck stand up’. Slim Chance were due to play it on Top Of The Pops but a technicians’ strike caused the show to be cancelled. Lane delivers the vocal in his understated but always affecting style as if reluctant to be the centre of attention. His departed Faces colleague Ian McLagan said he was ‘often prone to gazing off into the middle distance’ and didn’t know the meaning of the word pretentious. But he knew poignancy.
Among the cover versions of The Poacher is one by mega-Lane fan Paul Weller, who recorded a song about Lane called He’s The Keeper. Weller’s own acoustic pastoral phase, especially Wild Wood, was clearly influenced by Slim Chance’s three LPs.
Hart, the other original in the current Slim Chance who plays exuberant fiddle and accordion, felt Lane was never happier than at the farm, despite growing financial problems: ‘In later years he would sigh and say: That was a golden period. Ronnie was ahead of his time, unplugged before anyone else.’ Lane referred to his nemesis, money, in The Poacher…
Well I’ve no use for riches
And I’ve no use for power
And I’ve no use for a broken heart
I’ll let this world go by
The duo Gallagher and Lyle, formerly with McGuiness Flint, were also in the backing band, Benny on accordion and Graham on banjo and mandolin. Gallagher recalled: ‘Ronnie’s strength was putting human melody and storyline together. His phrasing was unique; he was one of the most underrated singers in the UK.’
Lane’s gloriously chaotic venture, the Big Top-style Passing Show, was rich musically but not commercially. At Chester Racecourse, there were more people in the circus than in the crowd. How Come was his last (top 11) hit, but not his last great song. Surrounded by his showman wagons, and inspired by Indian guru Meher Baba, he continued writing and performing with Slim Chance and others including Eric Clapton and Townshend despite the worsening impact of multiple sclerosis.
He was held in such high esteem he became the focus of concerts and tours on both sides of the Atlantic to raise money for other MS sufferers. He moved to Texas to seek treatment and a warmer climate, playing with some fine American musicians. Lane died in Colorado in 1997, aged 51.
Slim Chance – re-formed but unrepentant – will continue to honour Lane’s memory. At the Sound Lounge veteran recruit Geraint Watkins beautifully interpreted another treasured Lane song, Debris, a tribute to his lorry driver dad, from the Faces’ A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… To A Blind Horse. Watkins described singing it as a privilege.
Two days later, it was announced that Slim Chance guitarist Steve Simpson, who had described Lane’s Fishpool as ‘a parallel universe, a different kind of world’, had passed away. Their forthcoming gig at Putney’s Half Moon will be dedicated to more than one fine musician.
Hold Everything: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart
Karine Polwart’s message to listeners about her latest song for an exciting new venture is simple: Hope it touches you. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is the haunting Hold Everything. We could not fail to be touched.
When the beloved American songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter reached out to Polwart and Julie Fowlis to work on an album as a trio, the Scottish artists could not resist. Carpenter had provided harmonies on Fowlis’s 2017 album Alterum and had always admired Polwart’s work, including the magical Spell Songs project with Fowlis. They had all appeared on the BBC series, Transatlantic Sessions.
Polwart recalls Fowlis’s ‘You’re never going to believe this’ phone call: ‘I mean, of all the musicians in all the world that a multi-Grammy winning, multi-million album selling writer of immense heart and heft might want to collaborate with, Mary Chapin Carpenter wants me and Julie? I sob after hanging up.’
There’s a sobbing quality to Polwart’s song whose chorus ‘Hold everything dear’ borrows from the title of one of her favourite books by the late John Berger, his 2008 meditation on the causes behind political activism and resistance. It is the first single to be released from Looking For The Thread, conceived at Kinlochmoidart House in the remote west of Scotland last year and recorded in spring this year at the Peter Gabriel-founded Real World studios in Box, Wiltshire.
Could you hear the car coming?
Did you stumble and fall?
Did you sleep without waking?
Were you ready to go?
Or did you feel the tightening pain in your chest?
Did you lie down that morning and pray for eternal rest?
When you saw the wave rising
Did you run to the shore?
Were you half way through coffee
When he broke down the door?
Did you hear the brake sing as you stepped on the line?
Could you tell by the look in his eye that he’d do it this time?
Hold everything
Hold everything
Hold everything dear
It is a lament to leaving the living, a reckoning with mortality, an unsettling story made more affecting by the fragile beauty of the singing, as folk’s history of brooding ballads is poignantly brought up to date. ‘Were you swaddled in morphine?’
‘It was like some Hollywood notion of the Scottish Highlands,’ says Polwart. ‘Everything was conducive to creating. It was dark and we were hemmed in, sitting by the fire making stuff.’ As you’d expect with the quality of such company, the blend of voices is captivating. ‘That first visit to Kinlochmoidart helped us feel that we had some things that might serve us,’ says Carpenter. ‘We’d gather in the beautiful room where the fire was, play and sing together, and then go off to our little corners and work on stuff on our own, come back together, and get to the next step.’
The women wrote together though none of the co-written songs appear on the album, which may suggest a sequel. But Carpenter points out: ‘There’s no way any of the four songs that I contributed would have existed in the way that they do without Karine and Julie. So there’s that version of co-working together. It may not be a formal co-write, but the energy, the personality, the artistic thoughts shape the songs as well.’ For Fowlis’s Hebridean Gaelic contributions her bandmates, non-Gaelic speakers, had to learn their harmony parts phonetically.
The 10-track album, scheduled for release in January, was produced by Josh Kaufman whom we saw recently as part of another stellar folk threesome, Bonny Light Horseman. Carpenter, Fowlis and Powart returned to Kinlochmoidart earlier this year to rehearse for the studio where Kaufman recorded them live. It was a joyous experience. ‘The songs hadn’t been pre-produced to within an inch of their lives and the band hadn’t heard them in advance,’ says Polwart. ‘The musicians were such attentive listeners, none of them overplaying, all of them bringing a beautiful textural quality. There was something really fresh about it.’
There’s a promotional tour of the UK from March with the trio backed by the impressive support cast from the album, including Kaufman on guitar and keyboards and CaoimhÃn Ó’Raghallaig, master of the hardanger d’amore, a 10-string fiddle. We can expect songs of empathy, anger, connection, resilience and resolution, a thread that binds us all. If Polwart’s appetiser is any guide, we will hold them all dear.
Not The Only Road: Richard Hawley
My father, 40 years departed now, always loved a crooner. Frank Sinatra was his favourite but he was happy in the company of Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Dean Martin and even Matt Munro. We feel sure that among the modern serenaders he would have enjoyed the baritone of Sheffield-born Richard Hawley. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is the beautiful Not The Only Road. Dedicated to dad.
Hawley’s career as a beloved balladeer (a more respectful label than crooner) has been magnificently encapsulated by Now Then: The Very Best Of Richard Hawley, released last October. We were tickled by the wordplay in the title from a Yorkshireman immensely proud of his Pitsmoor roots.
Best Of albums are usually more miss than hit, particularly when hurriedly compiled by labels eager to make further inroads into our cash, but this really is the Very Best. It was compiled by the man himself and long-time producer Colin Elliot. The double LP, its vinyl in Sheffield Wednesday colours, comprised 23 tracks which were expanded to 32 at the CD stage. The prolific Hawley has so many songs tucked away a second volume is a distinct possibility.
The Now Then collection is a celebration of the songwriter’s profound blend of melancholy, warmth and romanticism, one observer calling his ballads ‘the sound of falling in love’. The phrase perfectly describes Not the Only Road, a recast of The Only Road from his 2003 album Lowedges, with Hawley’s honey-rich burr now swathed in luscious strings.
The only road I walk alone, where beauty nails me to her cross
Bleeding from my hands and feet I whisper that my love is lost
I water flowers in the rain, I dance beneath your silver flames
I’m crippled by the sound of love
Beating in my lonely frame
My lonely frame
So please keep me in your heart
So please keep me in your heart
The song was written in, of all places, Hawley Street where the musician lived in the days before he even held a bank account. We can imagine the orchestrated version becoming a funeral staple, with its mix of sadness and hope. Indeed it was played at Jeremy Hardy’s service, his wife Katie revealing to their friend that it was his favourite song. Another famous outing soon followed; it was used as the closing piece on the soundtrack for the TV series of The Full Monty. The stripped-back original might have been more appropriate.
We can thank Jarvis Cocker for playing a key role in encouraging Hawley to go solo after his contributions mainly as a guitarist to Longpigs and Pulp and record his first self-titled mini-album in 2001. There have been nine full albums since in which he has regularly namechecked the landmarks and curious corners of his birthplace. There have been countless film scores and we should not forget the collaborations: Arctic Monkeys, Paul Weller, Manic Street Preachers, Elbow, Lisa Marie Presley, Nancy Sinatra, Duane Eddy, Hank Marvin, A Girl Called Eddy, John Grant, Robbie Williams and Shirley Bassey.
The latest of those solo records, In This City They Call You Love, is a restrained affair but with barbed undertones about life under the last government. ‘It’s not a political, finger-wagging exercise. I’m not pointing the finger, it’s about loss,’ he told Clash Music. ‘It’s insane. I’m old enough to have lived through this shit at least once. The Thatcher years, and what it did to this region is [happening] now, and I can see it in every industry and every form of people making a living.’
Most of the material was recorded in Disgraceland, the studio in his garden shed. ‘But it’s not a depressing record. There’s a lot of hope in it, or I hope there’s hope! I meant to put something out there that’s the opposite of the vibes that’s being put out there by our leaders. There’s a lot of amazing, positive, beautiful things out there, but it’s the polarisation which really scares me.
‘We need to get together to affect change. We mustn’t be afraid. They use all the power they have to make us afraid. They make us doubt ourselves, they demonise young people and people who want to make a change to the way we think. The album is a reaction against all that.’
I’ll Never Get Over You, Prism In Jeans, People and Heavy Rain retain the tender quality of our favourite tracks from his 25-year retrospective: the buoyant Tonight The Streets Are Ours, the poignant Remorse Code, My Little Treasures (a tribute to his father), the psychedelia-tinged Don’t Stare At The Sun, The Ocean and Not The Only Road. The only cover is an intense interpretation of Bob Dylan’s Ballad Of A Thin Man you may recall from the Peaky Blinders soundtrack.
Then there’s the Hawley musical, Standing At The Sky’s Edge, a majestic love letter to Sheffield and social commentary inspired by his 2012 album of the same name. He told NME: ‘I lived through the story – either through myself or close family relatives – so I’m always on the edge of tears or really angry about the whole thing. The bottom line is that it’s touched a nerve with people; and that’s a nerve that needed to be prodded for some time.’
Most of his songs touch a nerve. The Now Then slow-burners might have been covered by Ol’ Blue Eyes himself if they’d occupied the same era. And dad, drumming the arms of his easy chair, would have been in heaven. The very best of Hawley will keep him in our hearts.
Fruits Of My Labor: Cris Jacobs
We are so relieved Cris Jacobs decided against jettisoning his music career. We would never have heard his latest album One Of These Days or his new single, Fruits Of My Labor, a Lucinda Williams cover and our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. A triumph of self-discovery.
Jacobs’ joyous collaboration with dobro guru Jerry Douglas was a defining moment in the revival of a Baltimore musician who had lost his way. Douglas produced the album, backing the singer-songwriter on a number of tracks, before embellishing his rendition of the Williams classic.
‘I was on the verge of giving it all up,’ Jacobs said at the time of the album. ‘I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with music anymore, because it felt like I’d been scratching and clawing for years – just never quite getting there, even though, when I zoom out and look at the life and career I’ve had, well, 20 years ago I would have been ecstatic if you’d told me these things would happen.’
Williams’ Fruits Of My Labour original was released just over those 20 years ago. Jacobs’ choice of cover, one of his desert island discs, could not have been more appropriate. After 10 years fronting The Bridge and another decade on his solo journey, Jacobs has earned the endorsement of bluegrass doyens Douglas and Billy Strings.
‘I met Jerry at a festival a couple years ago and I remember him watching my set,’ Jacobs told Live For Live Music. ‘Afterwards he was really nice to me and told me to keep in touch. As I was putting together my ideas for my next album I was wanting to take it back to a more bluegrass-y thing so I called him and he was into it right away. That solidified the idea. I hadn’t even written any songs yet but if, in the back of your mind, you know that Jerry Douglas wants to produce you, you get to work.’ Eleven fine tracks are the product of that new-found motivation.
He added: ‘I know he’s a great player but he’s also a great producer and person. When a guy like him is telling you that your songs are great and he’s patting you on the back, it’s pretty encouraging.’
Williams’ song about the loss of profound love, from her superb World Without Tears album in 2003, hardly requires improvement with its echoes of Sam Cooke but Jacobs gives the poetry therein a powerfully tender reimagining…
Baby, see how I been living
Velvet curtains on the windows to
Keep the bright and unforgiving
Light from shining through
Baby, I remember all the things we did
When we slept together in the blue behind your eyelids, baby
Sweet baby
Got my Mercury and drove out west
Pedal to the metal and my luck to the test, baby
Sweet baby
I been tryin' to enjoy
All the fruits of my labor
I been cryin' for you, boy
But truth is my savior
Meanwhile, Williams herself has been promoting the art of the cover by reworking the Beatles album Abbey Road, a delightful version of George Harrison’s Something providing the first single. Like all skilled interpreters, she somehow inhabits the song with her distinctive Louisiana drawl and makes it almost her own.
Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road, a mouthful of an album title, is eagerly awaited before Christmas. One of America’s greatest songwriters has always found time to honour her forebears and peers. The Beatles salute is part of her Lou’s Jukebox series she began streaming during the pandemic; there have been tributes to Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, southern soul from Memphis to Muscle Shoals, and country classics of the Sixties.
Jacobs’ One of These Days, influenced as much by folk and blues as bluegrass, boasts an impressive support team: Billy Strings, mandolin master Sam Bush, Lee Ann Womack, the McCrary Sisters, Lindsay Lou and rousing house band The Infamous Stringdusters with Douglas on dobro as well as the dials.
Jacobs’ storytelling style of songwriting is brutally honest as he confronts years of depression and self-doubt. Just listen to the beautiful Wild Roses And Dirt, the haunting Poor Davey, Queen Of The Avenue, the deeply personal Daughter, Daughter and Everybody’s Lost. Compelling reasons to reaffirm his calling.
‘As kids, we always had that feeling of, things are going to work out, the way I dream they’ll work out,’ Jacobs says. ‘But then, the goalposts keep moving. And you wake up one day, and you’re 45 and still reaching.
‘I’ve always found so much comfort in roots music – in string band music. There’s just something about the sound of all those instruments together that resonates with me to my core and brings me grounding and peace.’
As Williams wrote in Fruits Of My Labor: ‘Take the glory any day over the fame.’ Jacobs would concur.
Empire Of Love: Amythyst Kiah
In the domain of soulful, rootsy folk Amythyst Kiah is a force of nature. The Tennessee singer-songwriter celebrates her spiritual side on Empire Of Love, one of many powerful tracks on her latest album Still + Bright and our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com.
After her meditation on grief and trauma with 2021’s Wary + Strange, Kiah explores the struggle and wonder of self-discovery. She has made the album she has always wanted to make, revealing a deep affinity for Eastern philosophies and spiritual traditions and an almost mystical connection with the natural world, particularly the Appalachian landscape of home.
‘On the last record it felt so cathartic to write about all the pain I was dealing with, but this time the songs came from a place of finding joy in the music,’ she says. ‘In the past I felt so mired down with anxiety that I sometimes held back from what I really wanted to write about; I felt like I needed to play it safe and keep certain thoughts to myself. But now I’m at a point where I’m confident in what I value and love.’
Kiah calls Empire of Love her ‘personal theme song’ as she builds her own belief system, with her customary compassion. As her website declares, here is an impassioned declaration of devotion to her journey as a spiritual seeker, with grungy guitar and defiantly delivered poetry.
Concrete pillars, golden domes
There are kingdoms that have come and gone
That we’ll never know
My religion is none at all
I build my own cathedrals and let them fall
Cause I don’t want a theocracy
Or some idle/idol ideology
We all came from stars from above
I pledge allegiance to my soul
I’ll follow where she needs to go
I’m a pilgrim for the empire of love
A repudiation of organised religion, echoing Lennon’s Imagine; she will build her own cathedrals and let them fall. ‘I believe in carving a path in life that honours my own experiences in the context of the wider world,’ says Kiah, who wrote the track with Sean McConnell. ‘As a seeker in the mountains, my sense of spiritual connection stems from nature, which is connected to all of the cosmos. And there is no religious or social dogma that can change that.’
Her voice is gaining muscle and scale without diminishing her capacity for tenderness. ‘One of my main goals was to show a new side of myself as a singer. I’ve always loved really strong, gospel-style vocals, and I put a lot of work into increasing my range for this record.’ It is an impressive instrument.
The album was produced by Butch Walker (of Taylor Swift and Green Day renown) and recorded in Nashville. On Empire Of Love Walker contributes electric guitar, bass and keyboards with Ellen Angelico on pedal steel and Matty Alger on drums. Other highlights are the dazzling Play God And Destroy The World, featuring guest vocals by SG Goodman, the fiddle and mandolin delight that is SPACE, I Will Not Go Down (with bluegrass wizard Billy Strings), Let’s See Ourselves Out (‘Sometimes I wonder if we’re just a mistake/ Millions of primates who can’t seem to find their way’) and the menacing Die Slowly Without Complaint (with Avi Kaplan). She is more comfortable as a collaborator these days; working with her soul sisters in Our Native Daughters – Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell – was an inspirational foundation.
‘With all of my music, I’d love to leave people with the feeling that it’s OK to go off the beaten path and to structure your life in a way that feels right to you,’ says Kiah. ‘And just like with the last record, I hope that these songs can help people out if they’re going through a difficult time. That’s what I always hope for more than anything: for my music to be part of the healing process for anyone who might need it.’
Kiah was raised in Chattanooga and later moved to Johnson City. She says of Play God And Destroy The World: ‘To fit in, you had to go to church and have conservative values – and I know that being black wasn’t doing us any favours either. This song was written for the 15-year-old version of me who suspected that there was a big world out there that allowed for many beliefs and a more connected humanity.’
Johnson City, Tennessee
My home in Appalachia is still calling me
Give me a mountain, something divine
A river that can carve its way through stone and time
Wild Turkey, a song that mourns the loss of her mother who took her own life in the Tennessee River when Kiah was just a teenager, was a Song Of The Week from her last album which also featured the Grammy-winning anthem Black Myself. Empire Of Love is just as memorable. Daring, original, uncompromising. The plaudits for this pilgrim do not exaggerate.