NATHAN BELL – Loves Bones And Stars, Love’s Bones And Stars (Angry Stick Recording Company)

Loves BonesIn case you’re wondering, the title of the album is correct. Loves Bones And Stars, Love’s Bones And Stars is due for release on September 24th and is the fourth album in Nathan Bell’s Family Man series – and it’s rather good. The album is full of songs rather like his self-description of his life, “Utterly ordinary, always extraordinary”.

The style is Americana-ish, but the voice and the lyrics raise this album above the ordinary. Try the lyrics first. The opening track, ‘I Would Be a Blackbird (for Leslie Irene’ is a song for his wife whose favourite bird is, I gather, the Red Winged Blackbird (I’ve just looked on Google, it really is quite splendid) “If I was a word I would be your name/I would be your name/I would be a song/And if I was a song/That would still your heart/I would be a Blackbird”

How’s that for an expression of love? But good as the lyric is in its simplicity, it is made by the vocal. Bell has a gravelly voice and sings these lines gently. Just as a strong man with nothing to prove can be the mildest parent or nurse, the lyric, “If I was a word, I would be your name” becomes the softest touch of a fierce expression of love.

Right through, the album is consistently good. There are no promo videos yet so the link below is to Bell playing live in Edinburgh a year ago but on this raw-ish video Bell’s singing and playing come through pretty well.

To pick a few of the other tracks. ‘Whiskey, You Win’ is a cracking country song telling of drink, losing the woman, the truck, and the singer reflecting on his life – all wrapped up in a great tune and lyrics like “Now all of my dreams/Fit into the suitcase/That you threw into his pickup truck”. ‘Faulkner And Four Roses’ is another whisky song, but this time as a cure for insomnia in a song written for a friend who lost his wife of fifty years. ‘My Kid’ captures that point where we listen to our children and realise that they’re growing into the insightful adults we’ve been trying to raise them to be “Damn, damn, damn/Where’d he learn to talk [think, act in subsequent verses] that way/Damn, damn, damn/My kid’s going to be okay”. “Metal” is a track he describes as “a song of hoping that I will die well and knowing there’s no way of knowing if I will” with a refrain sung in that gravelled voice, accepting that this is the nature of things “I know this to be true and I don’t mind” as he thinks of his love, of his friends, and of the next generation coming along.

A couple of songs are on the album in alternate versions, ‘A Day Like This’ and the title track. Unusually, I find I listen to both versions, rather than stopping the album before they come on. I’ll let Bell describe the title song, “….By now I was writing songs about my own love. They were songs about the bones that keep us upright, that keep us moving. They were songs about how we look longingly toward the stars, yet we (I) love and cherish most the ordinary things within our reach”.

Mike Wistow

Artist’s website: https://www.nathanbellmusic.com

Nathan’s tour schedule is now online at https://nathanbellmusic.com/schedule

Nathan Bell live:

 


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