Lance Cowan releases The Air That You Breathe on July 24th. It’s his third album since 2024 and it’s a classy album – eleven songs, smooth Americana, beautifully played, arranged and produced.
Three of the songs have the word “Love” in the title and there are other tracks with “Truth”, “Home”, “Road” that give you a sense of how Cowan takes the ordinary as a starting point for his songs. ‘Be With You’ and ‘When He Was Here’ are among the six tracks that follow Lennon’s cue to use pronouns to bring the song closer to the listener.
To give an example … ‘The One You Love’ pulls you in this way:
“Your goodbye will haunt me
Until the day I die
But I’ll remember
There once was a time
When I was the one you love”
Cowan’s intonation phrases these lines strongly but reflectively, to a slow-paced melody – the kind of song that strong men sitting round a cowboy fire (does this still happen?) could listen to and, without feeling they were weak, hum along with companionably.
Though he’s only recently launched himself as an artist, and I’d guess that Cowan is in his sixties, it’s worth explaining how strong are the foundations on which he’s quickly become such a success.
In his early working life Cowan wrote for newspapers and built his skills in writing factual narratives. Then he became a publicist, telling stories that had to resonate with the audiences of his artists … and in thirty years he worked with the likes of Guy Clarke, Nancy Grffiths, Lyle Lovett et al. That can’t help but teach you a few things.
While his family grew, Cowan kept writing and playing. The songs on The Air That You Breathe, some co-written, are powerful because of all that Cowan has absorbed over the years. They are underpinned by his own (non-public) development, by the expertise of those he knows – in the supporting band, by the production / engineering … by the strength of the songs. “After all these years, watching and learning from those masters of songwriting, it’s been wildly rewarding finding that my own songs are connection with audiences”.
Cowan quotes Paul Simon comment that songwriters have an obligation to be truth-telling reporters of what’s happening around them as one of the drivers of his writing. I’ll pick up on a couple of the tracks as examples.
‘Where’d They Go’, written with Terry Clayton, is a masterpiece of story-telling. The song moves smoothly along – catchy melody, steady percussion interspersed with guitar and keyboards – to a tale of close neighbours – “They always tell us when they’re leaving town / we water their plants” – who aren’t there …” Jesus Christ, the dog’s still barking”. The story unfolds slowly and ends an unresolved mystery, “Nobody knows where’d they go”. There’s, simultaneous, gentle affection, puzzlement and worry. “And the dog’s still barking…” becomes a motif for it all, never allowing us to know if this is a domestic tale, a mystery, or the beginning of a horror film.
The other track to give a sense of the album is the title track. You can see Cowan in the video below – easy picking, semi-spoken vocal telling of life, a chorus rising to the end of the line so that we can’t help but join in. In pubs and clubs internationally there are people like the protagonist – with a song in their hearts whose dreams must wait as they try and make living – who know that music is
“… like sunlight in the morning.
The thing that feeds your soul
That gives your life its meaning.
It’s the thing you need the most.
The ground that you walk on, w
The dreams that you dream.
It’s the blood that runs through you
And the air that you breathe.”
Told through the tale of the lead character this is ‘show don’t tell’ songwriting at its best.
Moving from support to front of stage takes some doing; Cowan has done it, The Air That You Breathe is worth many a listen. The only gigs I can find are in the USA, but if he comes across to the UK he’d be worth looking out for.
Mike Wistow
Artist’s website: https://www.lancecowanmusic.com
‘The Air That You Breathe’ – live:
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