Thin White Road, the second album from the high-pitched Glaswegian folk singer-songwriter brings a more expansive sound to his fingerpicking with full band arrangements, including saxophonist James Steele and Ali Caplan from the Langan Band on fiddle. Opening quietly on circling acoustic guitar before the band kick in with pulsing bass, sax solo and Celtic shades, it begins travelling the title track down a path of paranoia and anxiety (“suddenly I saw a cloud bursting in the sky/You held my trembling fists and wiped my eyes/When the ground below me cracked/And swallowed me inside/I had a dream that I couldn’t tell you/You heard me whispering in my sleep/Strange days are here again/And I don’t how to act/When there’s nothing to believe”) as he speaks of “the emptiness of time that’s in between/The years I spent in love/And the wasted hours believing in a dream that’s dying”.
The track includes a line that takes inspiration from T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, one which will return later in the album; the first direct literary reference though is to author Laurie Lee with the strummed, piano tinkled gradual building sway of ‘Ode To Laurie’, which, crooned in the first person, is based around his book A Moment Of War which details his time as a combatant (like Hemingway and Orwell) in the Spanish Civil War (“In 1937, the year I hit the ground/I closed the door on my family, and left without a sound…then into Puerto Vigo, like a rust-corroded wreck…by the end of September, the war was closing in/The courtyards were empty, supplies were wearing thin”) with its images of death and sleeping in the wild (“I’d leave my companion to die in his blood/To sleep with the wolves again”).
The ripplingly picked and scurryingly sung with a strings bridge ‘Evelyn’ is a ‘what if’ song in which the narrator never leaves his hometown, settles down with his high school sweetheart but ends up alone (“the more you got to know me/The more I let you down… The more that I outgrew you/The more I lost your trust”), feeling hollow and unfulfilled (“Remember when you loved me/And when you changed your mind/I have children of my own now, they live in their mother’s house/Still play guitar at the weekends, hung in with the same old crowd/I lived on money that my father left, though I couldn’t do him proud/Making all the same mistakes again that broke our house”).
From fiction to fact, busily strummed and propulsive, inspired by watching her final appearance in Mulholland Drive, another first person song, ‘The Death Of Ann Miller’ is about the tap dancer (“the fastest feet that ever lived”) from the Golden Age who featured in such musicals as On The Town and Kiss Me Kate and went on to become a Broadway star. The song’s poignantly set against her final days, dying of lung cancer and being buried alongside her infant daughter who died a few hours after being born prematurely when her then husband threw her down the stairs (“I never heard my daughter/Calling out my name/So I’ll die in hope that I’ll see her again”).
Channelling Leonard Cohen, ‘The Harbour’ is loosely based on the story of Kathy Aimes in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and informed by McGovern growing up in the Scottish seaside town of Crail with the eerie silence as the mist creeps in. Another narrative, it centres on the doomed life of a woman called Jolene (“when mother died my brothers and I drenched ourselves in that holy water/It was a matter of time and some bottles of wine and the curse of my hair of golden/A boy just as sweet as his pockets were deep, it was there I took to whoring/Carry me up on the mountain and bury my shame/There’ll be no chorus of angels to mourn for my name”) and seeking redemption through murder (“I hatched a plan to take the life of a man whose sins were yet repented/I’d leave him to bleed where the dirt meets the sea/And all the town elders would surely agree/How holy and glorious this vile deed/And they’d welcome home their daughter…had justice been done then I’d surely have swung for the blood that soaks my soul/And If I am wrong then I’ll see kingdom come…this earth will swallow me whole/Or this town will swallow me whole/Or else Hell will swallow us all”).
Picking up a line from the title track, he returns to Eliot for ‘I Heard The Thunder Cry’, a reference to What The Thunder Said from The Waste Land for a lightly waltzing song that, with a lullabying oohing refrain, continues the recurring image of the lone wanderer (“I’ll go on living my life/Or wasting my time/Lifeless as I have always been/Smoking alone in the kitchen/I sat with my head in my hands/The sting of a wintery light cooled my coffee/And life passed me by”) with its plea for a moment of salvation (“let me sleep on your thighs/Then bring me to bed/And let me surrender/With tears in my eyes”).
Working on the notion that making a will is a foreshadowing of loss, ‘The Will’ with its fingerpicked, strings and piano mingling of Cohen, Buckley and Dylan, is a notable musical and emotional highlight as with cracked voice he sings “it now seems your race is ending/We’ve learned so much about ourselves/How you used to make me get so angry/I want to stand with you inside a hurricane/And scream until our lungs are empty/I want, I want to be by your side/When death comes and I can see your pain subside …I’m sick to death of feeling this way/Haunted by the fear of living”. Following the brief piano instrumental coda, ‘The Will/An Afterthought’, ‘I Made A New Friend’ continues on thoughts of death (“on the morning my father died/They took me away in a long black car/Staring out at the mournful faces/Lining up on our boulevard”), a miserable childhood (“I was a lonely boy/My parents had killed my joy/Bury my face in the dog every time they raised their voice”) and coming of age sex (“I learned to be a man in school/When a mystical woman poisoned my future/Burst my heart and broke my rules/We’d fuck in the afternoon, then sneak back into my room/Mother was shocked of the things that her angel boy knew”). And the legacies that continue to haunt us (“Well not much has changed since way back when/I’m still burdened by your regrets/Though you can pray for mercy and search for excuses/You can’t forgive what you can’t forget”), ending with the desolation of “I told a lie/But I don’t need to be saved/Before I step back into the night/Disappear, leave no trace/I know I begged you to crush me/But I’m going to break”.
It comes to a close with another spare fingerpicked, mournfully sung piano brushed ballad ‘In The Garden’ which, a direct nod to Dylan’s Gethsemane song of the same title, musically recalls the intro to ‘Fairytale Of New York’, blossoming to embrace fiddle and choir in a healing song about distance and how people drift apart when love fades (“when I said I never loved you/You couldn’t look into my eyes”) but of being grateful for the time shared (“I was glad that you met me/If only just to say goodbye”).
An album that, while not an instant hook, draws you deeper in the more you listen, adding weight to a reputation that only continue to swell.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.michaelmcgovern.co.uk
‘Evelyn’:
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