SOUL SURMISE

BEKI HEMINGWAY - WHINS AND WEATHER

I remember discovering Beki Hemingway's song Sinsick on a sampler CD back in the late 90s. I loved it and played it on my radio show. When Beki got in touch to say that she was coming to Belfast, I took a chance and booked her for a gig. 

She duly arrived with her guitar toting husband Randy Kerkman. On her first evening my wife Janice invited her to sing for a Chaplaincy girls group in our front room. I remember standing outside the door listening to see what her voice was like. Was the risk worth it? And then… she sang… oh my goodness. What a voice!

Beki and Randy took a number of year out of music. Randy became a sheriff in Denver, Colorado. Then, their itchiness for adventure and inability to settle brought them to Wexford - well I did say adventure. Just as the music started to get its time again, cancer struck and Beki was going through surgery and radiation treatment. It has been a journey with a, thank God, healthy destination.

So, Whins and Weather has been written in a bit of a storm. My World Is Out There gets them travelling, The Shape You Left Me In and Is This All are about illness, Because is about the love, earthly and divine that gets us through it and Thank You For The Rain is the most joyous four minutes of thanksgiving you will hear inside or outside of Church in a very long time. Duke Special even makes a wee cameo in the wonderfully  quirky finale Tourist. 

Whins and Weather is the music triumph for a couple who have conquered some of life’s most serious gales. Hemingway has found her Americana space and moved into it. She has never written a more stronger collection of songs. Kerkman has has never been a more driving and at the same sensitive musical companion. 

Whins and Weather is a book of Psalms. There is doubt and hurt and faith and celebration. If Maria McKee had made the follow up to You Gotta Sin To Get Saved that we all wanted it might have sounded a whole lot like this! 

THE KILLERS - WONDERFUL WONDERFUL

You don’t want to be lazy when listening to The Killers. Wonderful Wonderful comes across with immediate surface glitter and gloss. It is all shiny, pop ridden rock and the lead off single The Man comes across all menacing funk with arrogant strut.

A wee bit of attention and there is so much more to hear. I have been looking at that single, that I hated on first listen, as a follow up to the conversation they started on their prophetically challenging single Human back in 2008. 

In Human The Killers interrogate our modern society with the ultimate question, who are we as human beings? “Are we human, or are we dancer?” The Man is a dancer and the whole of Wonderful Wonderful could be seen as an exploration of the things that get in the way of our humanhood. 

There’s a lot of brokenness on Wonderful Wonderful. Singer Brandon Flowers’ wife has been going through depression and it makes these songs vulnerable and raw, no more so than when the Flowers children sing “Can't do this alone/We need you at home” on the Brian Eno co-write Some Kind Of Love, maybe my favourite song on the record.

Rut is written specifically about Flowers’ wife, from her perspective:

 

“Can't keep my mind off of every little wrong

I see the mouths are open, but I can't hear the song

I've done my best to fill 'em, but the cracks are starting to spread

Hey I won't blame you baby, go on turn your head”

 

In Life To Come, Flowers suggests maybe to his wife, himself or all of us  - “Just drop kick the shame”.

The Calling is be the song of redemption here or at least the invitation of it. Starting out with Woody Harrelson reading The Gospel According To Matthew’s like an old style preacher the song, with a tough guitar groove, is about a son seeking redemption for his father. There’s more of the barriers we all have to being fully human but God seems to be calling to some fixing:

 

"But Daddy did you think that you could outrun the Holy Spirit (here come the calling)

Lie, cheat, steal, hope they fix it all up in post"

 

Influenced by a painting of Caravaggio that is called The Calling of St Matthew we get a hint at where salvation might come:

 

“Follow the sun out of the night

Brother, just lean into the light

You wanna be sure, I’ll give you sight

Brother, just lean into the light.”

 

Personally I prefer the second half of Wonderful Wonderful. In the last 5 or 6 songs The Killers sound light on the ear but ring truth around the depths of your soul. 

VAN MORRISON - ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES

Someone told me once that CS Lewis, from the same square mile as Van, had said that we all leave our own gardens, take off and search the world but we all end up back in our own garden. I have no idea how true that is of most people but Roll With the Punches suggests Van Morrison has come all the way home.

When he started out in the early 60s there was just the Blues Club on the weekend. Morrison actually set up a blues club in Belfast at The Maritime Bar and wanted nothing more than playing great R & B, Gospel and blues with great players. 

Unfortunately for this shy, introverted, only child from East Belfast with an astonishing talent, a commercially fertile industry of rock and pop was about to explode across the world and he would find himself having to play in personas and places that he never coveted. It would get him labelled grumpy when it was actually just a miss match of industry and personality.

Fame is the song here that deals with that dilemma. Morrison has often ranted about the industry but here he is more objective, analysing the damage that fame can be and how the press can stoke up something that might not be at all healthy. 

So, here Van is in his seventies, ignoring the fame and doing what he always wanted. He is playing around Irish hotels, to crowds of just a few hundred, with great players and backing singers. 

Roll With The Punches is Morrison taking that fun into the studio. You can almost feel the levity between the notes. Van is enjoying himself. All his influences from those early 60’s days, Bo Diddley, Sam Cooke, Mose Allison and even Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In among that he adds his own songs about the usual subjects, that uneasiness with fame in Fame and the spiritual on Transformation. After the very satisfying co-write with legendary English lyricist Don Black on Keep Me Singing track Everytime I Hear A River they join up again on the title track here.

Van himself has spoken about how performance was the key to these recordings and boy did he get performances. Old pals like Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones add maturity of craft but Jeff Beck stands out. Rarely has the guitar played such a major role in a Van Morrison record and Beck's drive and drama with his finger dancing dexterity adds wonderful grace notes. Stuart McIlroy’s piano playing on How Far From God deserves a mention too!

Above all of that there is the one and only Van Morrison himself. He uses that instrument that is his voice in ways that a septuagenarian has no right too. He reaches high and wide and goes deep soul down. Check out Bring It All Home To Me if you doubt me! 

Whatever Van Morrison fans think about Roll With The Punches, and wherever they will argue it sits in the best records in his peerless catalogue, they need to realise the joy that it must have brought to Morrison. This is him at his deepest gladness. Maybe the deepest gladness of his entire career. The only thing I would change is the awful cover!

RICKY ROSS - SHORT STORIES Vol. 1

I was a Deacon Blue fan before anyone else I knew. Until Dignity was re-mixed and re-released no one was paying attention. I was near obsessed. I heard they were on a Television show one Sunday on Channel 4. I recorded it. It is probably still in the attic!

On this show Ricky and Lorraine were being interviewed sitting at a piano. At one stage Ricky explained how he wrote the songs and they did a stripped back version of Ragman. It was beautiful. I was entranced. When they released a similar version of Raintown as a B-side of the aforementioned re-mixed Dignity I lapped it up. Over the next few years we got piano versions of Wages Day and Circus Lights. I craved more.

Thirty years later and I have my album. Twelve songs with Ricky Ross at his piano, with minimal embellishments from a few cellos and other strings. It is all done in the template of a Ricky Ross solo concert. There are a few Deacon Blue hits scattered throughout and even The Germans Are Out Today from Ross’s very first album release, So Long Ago. Carole King’s Goin' Back gets taken out of its 1990’s Deacon Blue incarnation as well.

Around the better known songs Ross adds in the new ones. At My Weakest Point and Only God and Dogs particularly resonate with me but there might be more blogs about those. Without the band arrangements there is an extra emotional and spiritual intensity. Ricky’s uncluttered voice brings a beautiful mettle of melancholy to songs about loss, injustice and human brokenness with his usual sprinkled grace notes of hope and love. 

Gorgeous!

 

NEIL YOUNG - HITCHHIKER

For me personally, Neil Young’s series of Lost Treasures doesn’t get more treasured than this. It must have been 1978 when my mate Rab and I started listening to his sister’s boyfriend’s (thank you Mickey Graham!) Neil Young most recent album American Stars N Bars. For me Harvest and After The Goldrush came long after. I loved Stars N Bars; Hurricane with its perfect loved up guitar work out. I was 17 and guitar solos were a major play just then. I was also in love with Linda Ronstadt at the time, so her vocals on Hold Back The Tears helped.

Add, to the fact that this was my Young era that I have always generally been more drawn to the Canadian’s acoustic songs and it is easy to understand that this record of 10 songs all recorded on one night in the summer of 1976 would press all my Neil Young buttons.

Hitchhiker is a marvellous collection of songs from a man who is at the height of his song writing powers and in a prolific vein of form. That anyone could turn up in a studio and churn out this little collection of gems is extraordinary. There are only two unreleased tracks, Give Me Strength and Hawaii, and I’ve heard those on bootleg. The rest came out over the next few years spread over various records, Pocahontas and Powderfinger in very different soundscapes.

What I find particularly fascinating looking back with a much more critical mind than I had at 17 is that the aforementioned Powderfinger and Pocahontas about the native American Indians were written in the summer of 1976 at the same time the USA were celebrating its 200th birthday! Young is a contrararian not only in songs released, albums shelved and the sounds of albums produced but in his political finger posting too. He likes throwing a spoke into everything.

No more beautiful collections of spokes exists than this stripped back bundle of classics and rarities; just Neil’s strung out voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica. Pure, unadulterated sweetness!

THE WAR ON DRUGS - A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

As I am listening to The War On Drug’s follow up to their breakthrough record Lost In The Dream, I cannot help but imagining that this is what would have happened had Neil Young, during that 80s period when David Geffen was seeing him for not sounding like Neil Young, sacked Crazy Horse for Talk Talk, brought in Talk Talk’s producer Tim Friese-Greene and co-written with Bruce Springsteen! 

There are yearning harmonicas straight off The River or Harvest. There are the vocal intonations of Bruce, on In Chains. Neil Young guitar work outs are omnipresent. Adam Granduciel heaps all these influences through the blender and comes up with a sound all his own.

Like Friese-Greene, Granduciel is meticulous in his layering of instruments but with the density of the production the finished rock symphony glides gently over your soul. A Deeper Understanding is another huge slice of hypnotic ambient gorgeous lushness with psychedelic guitars and big wash synth. It is utterly beautiful.

Lyrically, A Deeper Understanding is caught between the dark and love. Those words are recurring throughout. Thinking Of A Place sets the content of this dichotomy of place: -

 

I'm moving through the dark

Of a long black night

And I'm looking at the moon

And the light it shines

And I'm thinking of a place

And it feels so very real

Oh, it was so full of love.

 

Pain best describes what Granduciel is seeking in that place: -

 

Pull me close and let me hold you in

Give me the deeper understanding of who I am

Yeah, I'm going back again, I'm waiting here

 

A Deeper Understanding is not so much a revelation of the answers to life’s dilemmas, it is more a beautiful piece of soundtrack to help us meditate on where we are, as we seek the guidance and the strength to find where to go next. 

It is another album of astonishing achievement and beauty.

EVERYTHING NOW - ARCADE FIRE

Everything Now the first single, and title track, off the new Arcade Fire record had me very excited. It was the most prophetic punch of pop to hit radio playlists I had heard since The Killers’ Human. That both band’s writers and frontmen are from Mormon backgrounds did cross my mind as more than a coincidence. Win Butler’s studies in theology and philosophy, with a particular love for Kierkegaard, adds to the intrigue.

It certainly adds to the poetic lyrics of Butler who has throughout the Arcade Fire catalogue been asking big questions of humanity’s condition and the seeking of redemption. Butler has been particularly good at holding up the culture to the light of revelatory critique. 

Having been absolutely smacked in heart and soul by the single, Everything Now and working out what the new t-shirt was about that I bought at their Belfast gig, I had the sense that that cultural collide would be all over the record. And…boy it is!

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the music. With their last record Reflektor Arcade Fire had me listening to sounds that I previously did not at all like. So it is again. Everything Now is all Abba dance grooves and elsewhere Human League are not far out of the mix. It’s all glitzy and boppy and incessantly catchy. 

Somehow into the lightness of the sound Arcade Fire have filled the ear candy tunes with soul colliding seriousness. I imagine though it might be a case of "those with ears to hear, let them hear” as I imagine many will miss the cultural thesis within.

As I listened to the full album I had an extra angle on the perspective. I had just arrived home from two weeks in Uganda. Having had that spiritual interrogation of my western decadent living, Arcade Fire then bombarded me with couplets that had my soul cowering.

The lyrics throughout the album seem simple in their writing but in their meaning they nail us. That opening single Everything Now, that appears three times, is about our need and expectation of having everything NOW but actually concludes that it is a fake claim that we actually have everything… or anything that counts. A week in Uganda would give us all a better clue as to what counts!

Creature Comfort is a song title that says it all. This is all about celebrity, self harm and suicide but a plea that whatever we are pray for can God make it painless! Comfort? Painless? Not words that most Africans know about in their everyday existence.

Signs Of Life is the futility of searching in the wrong hedonistic places for Signs of Life… and then doing it again. In the poorer areas of Uganda there is little time for such pursuits!

And on it goes… song after song… before Butler subtly changes the theme. A song called Good God Damn is a beautifully constructed guitar driven song. Good Good Damn begins with what seems like a luxurious, almost swaggering suicide “Put your favourite record on baby/And fill the bathtub up/You wanna say goodbye to your oldest friends/With a good God damn”. Then there seems a subtle shift, in the omnipresent word play of the record, and after saying goodbye to a meaningless world our protagonist finds that there might be a good God… damn! “But maybe there’s a good God, damn.” Too late! I might be contriving this exegesis but I think it Butler is having a gentle preach at the new atheists…

If that is not an intriguing enough take, let us go the last track, We Don’t Deserve Love. As a final subtle paragraph in the dissertation Butler finds himself in Christ’s passion. It looks like Mary has been left loveless by Jesus in the tomb but then a cry to come down from the cross and we find Arcade Fire’s Ecclesiastes' sermon with, “The ones you love always leave you alone/It’s always the Christ-types you’re waiting”… OH MY GOODNESS ME!

Brilliant as a pop record. Staggering in its brutal exposure of our empty western existence, even it you haven’t been to Africa recently. Utterly fascinating in the spiritual conclusions! Do you reckon I like it!

STOCKI'S FAV HALF DOZEN RECORDS OF 2017... SO FAR!

My favourite six records of the year so far show perhaps a lack of the experimental in my raging taste. This is a collection of great songs, performed in the traditional sense. What a collection of crafted art they are!

 

1. ROMANTICA - Shadowlands

 

Belfast born, now Twin Cities citizen, Ben Kyle gets the band together again and writes the lyrics and music that I would if I could. Harder To Hear had been my spiritual medication since the album was released last year BUT only officially in the Uk in March!

My review of Shadowlands here

 

2.  JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNITS - The Nashville Sound

 

Whatever you call this sound I cannot get enough of it. John Mayer has called Isbell the best songwriter in the world just now and I could not disagree. It caresses the ears, sings sweetly off the tongue and touches the head and heart and soul!

My review of The Nashville Sound here

 

3. VARIOUS ARTISTS - Treasure In A  Broken Land; The Songs Of Mark Heard

 

Twenty five years since we lost the genius that was Mark heard, Phil madeira has done and extraordinary job of bringing Heard’s incredible songs live with a cast of brilliance - Drew Holcomb, Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller, Birds of Chicago and Over the Rhine!

My review of Treasure In A Broken Land here

 

4. ANTHONY TONER - Ink

 

Northern Irishman Toner with his strongest collection yet. Magnificent craft. The song Alphabet starts off as certain loser of an idea and ends up an absolute triumph. 

My Review of Ink

 

5. RHIANNON GIDDENS - Freedom Highway

 

Giddens has the voice of her generation. Here she uses it for songs of oppression and liberation. 

My review of Freedom Highway here

 

6. STEPHEN FEARING - Every Soul’s A Sailor 

 

Canadian songwriter Fearing at his absolute best. His electric and acoustic guitars exchange centre stage as his voice is wrapped around soul nurturing songs.

My review of Every Soul's A Sailor

LINDSAY BUCKINGHAM CHRISTINE MCVIE

There’s something about the summer and Fleetwood Mac. Any glimpse of sun and opportunity to wear shorts, you can do worse than blasting out Rumours. It is West Coast rock after all.

So, on a recent sunny day I slipped Lindsay Buckingham/Christine McVie into my car stereo… and… it does sound like summer.

It is a long time since the last full Fleetwood Mac album and actually Christine McVie wasn’t on it. This one is certainly Buckingham McVie centric but, with Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass, it is just as much a Mac record as Say You Will.

It seems it should have been a full band album but Stevie Nicks went AWOL for some reason. These guys have the same amount of interpersonal drama as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and without doubt the records have suffered for the personal issues. When you have made one of the best records ever made during which two of your couples are breaking up surely you could do better forty years later! When Christine McVie returned after 15 years away she deserved the best. Shame on you Stevie!

So, the Buckingham McVie record has suffered… but how much? On first listening I was very disappointed but it has very much benefitted for giving it time. the shimmering bounce of In My World would have graced any Mac record. There is no doubt that Buckingham’s raw songs have always benefitted from the smoothness of the band sound.

McVie’s Red Sun is another strong one. The lyrical storyline of regret and looking back on love could sit on Rumours though the chorus is just a little lacking, pleasant and all as it is.

Too Far Gone rocks out nicely and On With The Show rolls along. Game Of Pretend and the closing Carnival Begin reveals that McVie hasn’t lost her deft touch with a ballad.

On a hot sunny day, this is worth a whirl. It is steady and sturdy, if it doesn’t quite soar as only Fleetwood Mac can. It is a long way better than Time or Behind the Mask for sure but is a Stevie Nicks short of great.

JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNITS - THE NASHVILLE SOUND

When Southeastern crossed my radar in 2013 I thought I had at last heard the follow up to Ryan Adams’ finest moment, Strangers Almanac with Whiskeytown. Southeastern had that same immediacy and familiarity as Strangers Almanac with at the same time all the fresh sense of originality. Isabel’s follow up Something More Than Free was equally engaging.

 

Where his mate Ryan Adams’ output has been a little erratic, it seems impossible for Isbell to be anything other than consistently brilliant. So, yet again with The Nashville Sound Isbell has made a mother stunning collection of songs.

 

The record rocks harder than the previous two with Cumberland Gap and Anxiety turning Isbell’s volume levels way up. There’s a groove to White Man’s World that echoes one of last year’s songs of the year Black Man In A White World by Michael Kiwanuka.

 

Louder or rockier or whatever Isbell’s definition of The Nashville Sound is, the lyrics still have those deft touches of lyrical wonder. This record is filled with white man observation on marriage, fatherhood and Trump’s America! 

 

The influence of Amanda Shires in Isbell’s life is omnipresent. On the record her fiddle playing is like a pipe bomb, to use an old Isbell image. She explodes into songs bringing energy and vitality. 

 

Of course she is so much more. As well as embellishing the tunes Shires is between and on the lines of the songs themselves. Shires is the companion who rescued Isbell from his addictions and mothered his brand new daughter.  In If We Were Vampires, where he throws out line upon line of adoration towards her, I particularly love the lines:

 

“The fragile heart you protected for so long

Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong"

 

The daughter they have had together is a reason for Isbell to believe in God in a world where that is getting harder and harder. In White Man’s World:

 

"I'm a white man living in a white man's nation

I think the man upstairs must'a took a vacation

I still have faith, but I don't know why

Maybe it's the fire in my little girls eyes."

 

 

Do not think for a moment that this record is all about some comfortable domesticity. Isbell’s new contented family life is a place of strength from which he surveys and critiques the world. Trump’s new America is a reality but hope and purpose ends the record. In Hope The High Road:

 

"Last year was a son of a bitch

For nearly everyone we know

But I ain't fighting with you down in a ditch

I'll meet you up here on the road"

 

 

Finally Isbell’s altar call sermonic conclusion would be one that this preacher could do worse than return to time and time again. Whatever the world throws, however much we struggle in personal or national life, Isbell has a prayer and spiritual pure gold nugget:

 

“I hope you find something to love

Something to do when you feel like giving up

A song to sing or a tale to tell

Something to love, it'll serve you well.”

 

 

There can be debate as to whether this is the best of Isbell’s recent trilogy. What The Nashville Sound has, that the 400 Units have added, is variety of sounds. I would suggest that when you add it to Southeastern and Something More Than Free that it is safe to say that no one has made three records in a row that are as consistently good as these three, for a very long time.