Gospel-era Dylan is evoked again in “Hardlytown”, which is a more muscular take on HGM’s regular sound, but the true highlight of the set is “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)”, with its soulful strut and blissed-out atmospherics. “Mighty Dollar” leans heavily into smoky, sweaty funk – which makes total sense, considering that Taylor gave a shout-out to Sly & the Family Stone in an essay he wrote and released in the period preceding the release of the record – while the title track, which follows, strips out the heat and muscle but fills the gap with ambience and jazz-inflected somnambulant keyboard washes. “The Great Mystifier”, which splits the difference between gospel Dylan and mid-70s Grateful Dead (check out the solo), is infectiously upbeat and gently groovy. Opener “Way Back in the Way Back” is charmingly simple and deceptively rich, with smooth soul keyboards and crisp percussion providing gentle propulsion to the brass and silky vocal arrangements. When the time came, however, he surrounded himself with collaborators and friends: “Songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, songwriter and Tony Award–winning playwright Anaïs Mitchell, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Dawes’ brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith, and his oldest musical confidant Scott Hirsch.” Although the genre he pursues is old, his approach is completely fresh - including on his tenth outing, Quietly Blowing It.Īs it turns out, the album was inspired by Taylor’s decision to cancel an Australian tour in early 2020, and take some time to recover from the sheer exhaustion of being out on the road in the Trump era. ![]() Each of his studio albums, including 2019’s Grammy-nominated Terms of Surrender, has shown him to be a singular songwriter, cut from the same cloth as Springsteen and Petty and Dylan but unique and thrilling in his own way. It’s also ideally suited for this post-lockdown haze we’ve all been stumbling into this summer. ![]() ![]() Taylor’s is a spiritual music, a reflective and contemplative music. While his music is far from reggae – more of a feel-good, cosmic kind of Americana – it’s certainly imbued with the same narcotic, all-consuming sense of oneness with some kind of force larger than ourselves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |