The fifth solo album from the former Oysterband member, now based in Sweden (hence the appearance of Swedish musicians, John Eriksson, Gustav Andersson, Anders Peev, Emma Härdelin and Baskery’s Sunniva Bondesson) expands his folk roots to take in Americana influences, guest contributions from his old stomping grounds coming from Ben Paley and, one of the three female duets, Kathryn Roberts. Opening with the sound of a vehicle motoring along, the fingerpicked title track sets things in motion with a celebration of touring (“Another day another town/I go to work when the sun goes down/Cities count the days along the way/Driving through the pouring rain/Heading for the next meeting place/People waiting there I am expected”) coupled with some existential music (“Alone we come into this world/And alone we go/But I have friends I know/And there’s a place to go/Even for a shadow”).
Previously released as three different singles, ‘Falling Like Thunder’, a mostly spoken track with keyboards backing, now gets a fourth variation for its historical retrospective and call to not forget what it teaches (“They said we learned from our mistakes/We built the UN and the welfare state/But as Castro said the revolution never ends/We never thought about it then/But democracy and the things we hold dear/Can never be won outright/You have to carry on the fight/’Cos if the reins go slack/Things have a way of sliding back”) and even a reminder that “what you get is what you pay for/That is what taxes are made for”.
A duet with Bondesson, the gradually building piano ballad ‘Wind And Steel’, warmed by Hamburg brass musicians and harmonica, returns to the road with “In my dream you take the wheel/Through the desert wind and steel/A thousand miles of empty road/On and on the highway goes”, though this time the mood is more downbeat (“There’s nothing I would rather do/Than stay and drink the evening there with you/To stand on the canyon with the wind in our hair/And listen for the spirits who move there/But they all they all slip away”).
Paley joins on fiddle for ‘The Sky Was Black With Diamonds’, a decidedly country-coloured number with Frankie Laine and even Dolly Parton musical echoes, with its theme of generational change (“I heard a new voice calling from some far distant plain/Far from the life I left behind where I shook off the shackles and the chains/I thought about my father so long ago he died/He was touched by the eagle’s wing he was born to fly/And fly he did and on he flew/And he passed to me the things he knew… I think about my father the things we left unsaid/And how each generation is so different from the rest”).
Not a Jam cover, ‘Going Underground’ is piano-accompanied ballad duet with Roberts drawing on how lockdown forced many to make choices about whom they were going to spend it with (“I’ll be holding on to you/You’ll be holding on to me…Take my hand I’m by your side/Together we will make this right/And get through the storm”).
Three traditional numbers follow, a jaunty rockabilly romp through ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, a Scottish song referencing to a famous shipwreck in the 1200s, with Eriksson providing the brushed snare drum propulsion, the instrumental old Irish march Bonaparte’s Retreat with Peev on nyckelharpa, and duetting with Härdelin, ‘Black Is The Colour/En Vacker Vän’, a fusing of American-Scottish-Irish and, sung in the original, Swedish traditionals, both on a theme of lost love. A second brief instrumental, ‘Tyyne Laine’, translated as calm wave and also the name of his wife’s Finnish grandmother, is played on an old Swedish piano.
Cello and piano colour the dramatic The Wind, a pathetic fallacy track in which the storm conjures memories of a lost love (“It’s just the wind that rattles on my door/It’s the wind and nothing more/It must be the wind not your step upon my stair/There’s no one there”) and expands into images of anxiety and dread (“Men of some kind lose their mind/When the wind blows every day/And drives them to a violent rage…I thought I was safe safe within these walls/But they can fall…I see that figure coming closer now/It’s the old man he’s staring back at me/He looks familiar”).
Written in memory of a late friend who passed too soon, the stentorian ‘When We Reach The Sun’ is the final of the originals, the album appropriately ending with a circling fingerpicked sign-off cover of Jimmy Webb’s Adios and the second song to mention margaritas. Having a lived-in warmth to match Cooper’s deep voice, it’s another fine addition to his impressive catalogue.
