FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK:
Say I Love You: Anderson East
My first live experience of Anderson East came at the Jazz Café in Camden six years ago when he was promoting his excellent Encore album, which spawned a Grammy-nominated No1 radio single, All On My Mind.
It struck me that I was hearing the most exciting male voice since Jess Roden was in his pomp in the Seventies and Eighties. East’s latest single, Say I Love You, his first fresh music for four years, is our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com.
East, born Michael Cameron Anderson in Athens, Alabama, 36 years ago, blends southern soul, R&B and jazz-flecked blues with a voice of gravel and honey that can breathe fire and whisper sweet everythings. The parallel with the soulful Roden, as curiously neglected as East is in danger of becoming, is not far-fetched.
Say I Love You is our first delicious taste of his forthcoming album, Worthy, co-produced by his old buddy and fellow multi-instrumentalist Dave Cobb, and recorded in Nashville, where East is based, and in Savannah, Georgia.
Worthy, due out on May 30, is billed as his most personal and uninhibited work yet, featuring guest artists such as Foy Vance and Bonnie Bishop and songwriting collaborations with Nashville’s finest: Lori McKenna, Natalie Hemby, Aaron Ratiere, Ashley Munroe and Trent Dabbs. We are told it is a celebration of love, self-acceptance and redemption.
East’s hushed but impassioned vocal is enhanced by impeccable instrumentation – Cobb’s guitar and his own, Philip Towns’ piano, bassist Gregg Garner, drummer Darren Dodds, and the trumpet and saxophone of Ben Clark and Nate Heffron respectively – on an album steeped in a Muscle Shoals-inspired sound. However, Say I Love You, co-penned by his friend Dabbs as was Fool Yourself, reminds this listener more of Motown with its melody exuding faint echoes of Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted.
It’s hard to feel time passing
Never notice it till it’s gone
And I never wanna live without you
No matter how long
So let me hear you say I love you
Say it now so all the world is right
If all of our tomorrows ended
I wanna hear you say it one more time
East is an old flame of country star Miranda Lambert with whom he wrote two songs for her The Weight Of These Wings album: Getaway Driver and Well-Rested. The aforementioned Encore was also notable for King For A Day, written with formidable couple Chris and Morgane Stapleton (‘I’d rather be king for a day than a fool forever’), and the kind of smoky ballad that brings the best out of East, This Too Shall Last, a former Song Of The Week here.
There is a sense of liberation about East’s storytelling on the 10-track Worthy, his debut for Rounder Records. Unlike his previous collection, May We Never Die, which was recorded in the isolation of the pandemic, Worthy revels in the magical process of a roomful of musicians playing live together. There was a lack of pressure now his deal with a major label had ended and the relentless cycle of recording and touring had begun to feel hollow against what he truly wanted from music.
After recording at Cobb’s Savannah studio, Anderson took the results back home to Nashville, laying down his own vocals and using some of the digital know-how he’d gathered on his previous album to augment his analogue passion. His website picks up the story: ‘He deliberately left space for accidents and magic, often taking days-long breaks from tracks so as not to overwork them. He kept things casual. When Vance and Bishop stopped by to spend the night during a road trip, he asked if they might like to sing on Never Meant to Hurt You. Their mighty vocals reinforce its powerful embrace, giving it an unexpected gospel conviction. He could do what he wanted.’
Here is a deeply soulful performer ‘more confident and commanding than ever now that he knows there is nothing to prove’. A worthy reintroduction to an artist whose career should not go unfulfilled.
Looking For The Thread: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart
I made a prayer from what you said
That no one is ever dead
Because time and love remember
For those bearing the pain of loss, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s tender enunciation of these lines can act as solace. They also provide our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, Looking For The Thread, the title track of the American’s latest offering, a collaboration with Scottish folk luminaries Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart.
The trio are a match made in heaven: Carpenter’s honeyed hush, Fowlis’s crystalline Hebridean beauty and Polwart’s powerful and poignant blend of ancient and modern. This may be a one-off alliance but we are left craving further divine connection.
Looking For The Thread is our second choice from the album following the stunning track delivered by Polwart, Hold Everything. It is also worth listening to both traditional Gaelic songs gloriously led by Fowlis whose bandmates had to learn their harmony parts phonetically. When those three strikingly different voices entwine, the impact is mesmerising.
The two Celtic artists had combined for the magical Spell Songs project. When they received a call from their Virginia soulmate to write together, there was only one outcome: bliss in triplicate. Polwart was happy to be reduced to tears.
The title track has the same lachrymose effect as Fowlis’s whistle flits and soars over Rob Burger’s piano intro, understated drumming and Carpenter’s soothing low-register, almost spoken vocal:
The dark road up ahead
The light in late September
The music in my head
That I’ve memorised forever
Words I should’ve said
And doors I never should’ve entered
I’m just looking for the thread
That ties it all together
The album was conceived at Kinlochmoidart House in the remote west of Scotland in 2023 and recorded in spring last year at the Peter Gabriel-founded Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire, with Bonny Light Horseman’s professor of subtle textures Josh Kaufman at the helm.
The women wrote together at their Scottish retreat though none of the co-writes appear on the album. An excuse for a sequel, then? As Carpenter says: ‘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.’
Regret, the passage of time, the fragility of life: this is the thread woven by many of these 10 memorable tracks: Carpenter’s A Heart That Never Closes (‘How fast it all goes, need to catch your breath/ Time is just a bandit trying to steal what’s left’), Satellite, the curious tale of an abandoned, decommissioned space probe, and the gorgeously comforting Send Love; Polwart’s beautifully observed Rebecca (the name carved into a century-old beech tree) and You Know Where You Are; and Fowlis’s English rendition of Silver In The Blue, fondly following the journey of a threatened species of salmon. The thread, though, keeps returning to Carpenter:
There are dark roads up ahead
Tie your compass to some leather
We are marching to the edge
In every kind of weather
If life is but a pledge
I have made mine from a feather
We eagerly await their UK tour in the spring with an admirable support cast including Kaufman on guitar and keyboards and CaoimhÃn Ó’Raghallaig, master of the hardanger d’amore, a 10-string fiddle that adorns many of these tracks. We trust the thread will have been located.
Pants Is Overrated: Lyle Lovett
Our first concert of 2025 at London’s Cadogan Hall next week will be like a reunion with an old friend. Vinyl classics from Lyle Lovett’s back catalogue, beginning with 1986’s self-titled album, have been lovingly replayed in anticipation. The Texan is lauded for his exquisite balladry but our Song Of The Week choice at herecomesthesong.com is a salute to his whimsical side, Pants Is Overrated.
The playful song appeared on his last album in 2022, 12th Of June, his first music for a decade. The title track is a paean to parenthood that came to him late in life; he and his wife April Kimble, a film and music producer, welcomed twins on that day in 2017, and it was the young son and daughter who inspired Pants Is Overrated.
One can question the grammar of the title but not the wry humour that has been a characteristic of his songwriting career. The Houston-born Lovett recalled: ‘I wrote the song before the pandemic. I started singing one day as I was trying to convince my then two-year-olds to put clothes on. And I just thought to myself, they probably have it right.’
Lovett likes to have fun with the absurd, and his delivery is at its most deadpan here as he lists examples in which pants are, sorry is, overrated: babies’ birthday suits, the kilts of his Scottish ancestors, the sheep in the meadow whose wool make him sweaters and hats, even the attire of Jesus – with a gospel-tinged call-and-response structure and New Orleans-style sound. That sincopated sophistication is founded in his love of jazz.
Lord Jesus knew just what to wear (oh, yes, he did, yes, he did)
Oh, to live a life in desert air (ooh)
He walked the earth in poor man’s shoes
And sang this ninth beatitude
If 12th Of June is a touching ode to their children, Her Loving Man is a love letter to his wife. Lovett’s ballads, infused with a laconic wisdom, can be sentimental but he always skips the saccharine. His attractive back-of-the-throat crooning is an unmistakable trademark.
The 67-year-old Lovett, who chose to remain in the home he grew up in, built by his great-great-grandfather in east Texas, maintains a powerful sense of identification with his roots and invokes voices of the departed; the fragility of life is becoming a favoured theme.
‘At the core is just being grateful for family and finally having a chance to be a dad after all these years – and also being grateful for not realising what I was missing all this time. It really is a looking back on your life perspective and then just feeling grateful I’ve had my parents and my family that got me to this point.
‘Home is this farm place that my great-great-grandfather came to in the early 1850s. Home is keeping my family’s place as intact as I can. And teaching my children about this place and their place in the family. I hope one day when my children are old enough to understand those songs they will take from that, that their dad loved them.’
Lovett, who has degrees in German and journalism, is chiefly associated with the country genre, but it is country with a twist. There is more than a touch of the outlaw to this cowboy and he and his Large Band incorporate Texas swing, blues, folk, jazz and gospel in their eclectic repertoire.
Lovett met his long-time collaborator, Francine Reed, a blues singer in his Large Band, through an ensemble called The Rogues he met at a country fair in Luxembourg. Lovett sat in with them and they sat in with him during his early albums. Reed, guitarist Ray Herndon, steel player Paul Franklin and trombonist/horns arranger Charles Rose have been stalwart cohorts.
The Texan sang harmony vocals on Nanci Griffith’s The Last Of The True Believers album in 1986, and there have been collaborations with Randy Newman, Al Green, John Hiatt and Asleep At The Wheel. He covered his friend Guy Clark’s great song Step Inside This House and used it as the title for his 1998 double album tribute to fellow Texans. Acting has been another string to his bow; his film roles include four directed by Robert Altman.
12th Of June was his 12th studio offering, if you ignore the compilations, live album and movie soundtrack, co-produced by Chuck Ainlay who was engineer on his third album, Lyle Lovett And His Large Band. His latest work was hardly a ground-breaker – he has already achieved that status – but further confirmation of a master storyteller and polished performer who is more contented than ever.
Late arrivals to Lovett’s work should be encouraged to dip into the archive. Here are 10 recommendations to start with: The Waltzing Fool, Farther Down The Line, This Old Porch, She’s No Lady, LA County, If I Had A Boat, She’s Already Made Up Her Mind, The Road To Ensenada, My Baby Don’t Tolerate, I’ve Been To Memphis.
Those serenades of southern charm are the most memorable but we should always find time for the quirky and the faintly ridiculous. It would be pants not to.
Fires On The Wind: John Pearson’s Blues & Beyond
Watching events unfold in California as wild fires raged must have been like reliving a nightmare for Kent-based songwriter John Pearson. The Merseyside-born guitarist and singer endured a similar trauma in Portugal in August, 2003, which eventually led to a haunting soundtrack, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, Fires On The Wind.
He and his wife Kathy were building a home in the beautiful hills of Monchique inland from the Algarve coast but they had to abandon it when the devastating fires swept through, fleeing for their lives along with everyone else. ‘Ash came fallin’/ Dropping down like sin… Better round up all your kin.’
They returned to a moonscape although their shell of a main building remained. Many would have given up and gone home but the couple gritted their teeth, salvaged what they could from the ruins and started again. Their idyll would be realised. John’s music projects were delayed while building work was restarted but his guitars had been spared, if not his record collection and most of their belongings in a flattened storehouse, and would be put to magical use again.
Takes all your reason
Leaves you hollow like a shell
Livin’ in this eden
With all you love so well
As the land becomes a sea of flames
You watch this heaven turn into hell
Pearson’s track notes described the horror chillingly: ‘The sound of burning trees – acres of them – was like thunder, and you could feel the heat on your face as the flames crested the hills, coming ever closer. It was three o’clock in the afternoon but the sky was just like night. The evacuation of the village had to be quick – pick-ups loaded with family, belongings and anything that could be saved, including livestock. Tables, chairs, beds were piled high on vehicles of all shapes and sizes, crawling nose to tail through the dense smoke along the only road left open – to the west coast and Aljezur.
‘The fires raged all day and night and the sky glowed orange until dawn. Most of us spent the night on the beach unable to sleep and knowing our homes had gone. When dawn came and we were allowed to go back inland I’ll never forget that drive, at every turn getting out of the car to drag burnt and fallen trees out of the way. Nothing was left but a black landscape with charred trees standing on the skyline, many still burning. Those fires destroyed about 95 per cent of the beautiful hill country of Monchique.’
Death and desolation
Is all that you can see
It’s the Book of Revelation
And Deuteronomy
In a barren landscape all around
Neighbours stand weeping endlessly
Fires On The Wind appeared on Pearson’s 2007 album Eucalypso Furioso, the title a reference to the highly flammable eucalyptus trees prevalent in the Monchique region which regenerate quickly after forest fires.
The guitarist’s support cast do a fine job recreating the menace of the approaching flames and the frightening experience of being on the run from an inferno: keyboard player, accordionist and co-producer Harvey Summers, Jem Turpin on harmonica, bassist Colin Gibson and drummer Liam Genockey. The common denominator was their friendship with Kenny Craddock; the multi-instrumentalist had relocated to Monchique in 2001 but died in a car crash the following year shortly before John’s arrival there. They had collaborated back in England and were planning to do so again. The tragedy before the multiple tragedies.
John, an old bandmate of mine from our folk-blues adventures with Breakdown and About Time in the Seventies and early Eighties, has started performing again after a post-pandemic hiatus and included Fires On The Wind during a gig at the Acoustic Blues Club at the Jenny Lind in Hastings recently; you can catch it all on YouTube.
In 2004 Pearson recounted his harrowing story to Paul Jones on his BBC Radio 2 Blues Show, playing three songs live in the studio. Jones accompanied him on harmonica on a stirring rendition of Bob Dylan’s Man Of Peace. Fires On The Wind was still waiting to be written.
When time allows a dignified distance no doubt the calamities of Los Angeles and its environs will be painfully retold by musicians in homage to lost friends. Music is often regarded as cathartic but easing heartache as profound as this is a difficult process to comprehend. One of Pearson’s most impressive compositions will continue to provide an eerie parallel.
For more CD information visit johnpearsonblues.com
K’s Waltz: Rose Cousins
The award-winning Canadian songwriter Rose Cousins has paid homage to a lost friend as part of a new project exploring the complexities of love. K’s Waltz, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, honours the memory of a fellow native of Prince Edward Island, Koady Chaisson.
Cousins explains the background to her ode to Koady, banjoist and founder member of folk roots trio The East Pointers, who have collaborated with her throughout a career spanning two decades: ‘It’s hard to process and harder to accept that he’s gone. It’s also incredible to feel his presence still having a profound influence on the world he made. K’s Waltz marvels at the limitless capacity of a giving heart, the grace in every day survival.
‘In 2021, every day of December, his birth month, Koady dived into freezing cold water to raise awareness and money for the Unison Fund which supports Canadian music industry folks in times of hardship. The diving and fund-raising has continued and this year proceeds will go to Water First, Canada’s leading charitable organisation working with indigenous communities to resolve local water challenges.
‘Koady was kind, hilarious and generous with his time, talent and tomfoolery.’ He passed away on January 6, 2022, at the age of 37. The song has a stark beauty, Cousins’ economy of words allowing the listener scope for interpretation.
Into the water we go every day
Floating the notion that we’ll be OK
Is it that we both stop and continue to grow
The more of the living
The less we know
You beckon me
With your melody
Cousins does not just dip her toe into her favourite subject, like Koady she takes the full plunge. Everybody loves a great love song, and Cousins promises a clutch of them on her sixth full album Conditions Of Love, Vol 1, due out on March 14. Co-produced with long-time bandmate Joshua Van Tassel, it marks a return to the multi-instrumentalist’s preferred medium, the piano. ‘Piano is where I feel the most connected. It’s the best partner in expressing the emotion I’m mining,’ she says.
Majestically played, the piano also gives space for that achingly clear vocal to cast a spell. K’s Waltz features a dreamy horn sequence, arranged by good friend Dietrich Strause, and Cousins is aptly joined by Koady’s cousin Tim Chaisson and Jake Charron of The East Pointers on fiddle and synth.
The Nova Scotia-based artist’s website declares: ‘Ever the emotional explorer, Cousins seeks truth, in all its imperfection, in the depths of humans’ most complicated of emotions: love. The journey results in a striking clarity, and it’s the gift of that clarity that brings on surprising tears.’ Take your partners for a poignant waltz.
You are the colour in every room
Every time you leave
It’s always too soon
You’re the dancer first
Even when it hurts
‘Love feels great and makes us ridiculous,’ she says. ‘It’s tiring and intense, joyful and devastating. Falling in love, being in love and staying in love are all such different things. Being human is emotionally complicated enough without attempting to relate to another who is just as complex, and in the most vulnerable of arenas: romance. Love is wondrous and absurd (and very hard). Humour helps.’
Cousins, 47, released two EPs before her full-length debut, If You Were For Me, in 2006. Juno Awards followed for We Have Made A Spark and the adventurous Bravado, and her 2017 album Natural Conclusion (produced by Joe Henry and showcasing an admirable selection of co-writes after she had feared burnout from years of constant touring) was nominated for a Grammy. ‘My goal was to be wide open emotionally,’ she said. It remains her goal.
Conditions Of Love, especially with the hint of a second volume, should warrant similar acclaim. K’s Waltz is the fifth canapé served before the main course following Forget Me Not, Borrowed Light, I Believe In Love (and it’s very hard), described as the cornerstone of the album, and the artful Denouement which invites the listener ‘to fill in the blanks between paired words to create their own love story’.
‘What are we looking for from love, anyway?’ says Cousins. ‘We want to show and tell, to be seen, understood, and held. We want expansion, a new version of love, and at the same time, safety. We want to be loved for who we are, yet often, we don’t even know the answer to that question. But longing and belonging spur us to keep trying romantic love. We willingly dive in with someone brand new, a stranger actually, without ever knowing how the story will end.’
She addresses Koady at the denouement of K’s Waltz: ‘Your heart/ It did not give out or give in/ It gave everything.’ Just as Cousins does to the art of serving a love song. Poetry and emotion.