Depicting the journey from childhood, through manhood to fatherhood, featuring just vocals, guitar and double bass, all twelve songs on Father To The Man (all bar one written aptly in DADGAD tuning) are inspired by and dedicated to Wates’s four year old son, Gabriel. As such, it’s a very pastoral folky acoustic album that will inevitably conjure references to Drake, Jansch, Garbutt, McTell and their ilk.
Divided into two thematic parts, the first, ‘The Child’, begins with the watery, fluttery notes of ‘(Like A) Songbird In The Spring’ with its McCartney-hints and actual and metaphorical talk of a new morning (“Hey sleepy eyes where have you been/On magic pillows soaring up and away/And did you rise shake off your dream/With all the sadness of a cold winter’s day/Then like a songbird in the spring/Try your voice and let it ring/The time will come to spread your wings and fly”) and the encouragement to “find the song you were born to play”.
A more urgent, driving rhythm of notes, ‘The Fair’ captures the excitement of the shared experience (“There’ll be rovers travelling, traders lining up their wares/There’ll be soldiers there’ll be sailors even dancing bears/Take my hand and we’ll go to the fair/See the girl with laughing eyes and jewels in her hair/For a price she’ll be your bride then vanish in thin air/You’ll love to watch the lions and the tigers prowling in their lairs”), which isn’t hard to read as a metaphor for journeying through life.
A lost love regret fairytale is the impetus of the circular minstrel-like fingerpicked ‘The Lady And The King’ (“There was a king looked out upon his palace lawn/Just as the dawn was breaking/Then sighed the king what use is all my wealth to me/For yet my heart is aching/Alas the day I sent my love away from me/Her eyes no more I shall see/For rumor said that she was false to me/Though I did love her madly”). Keeping the childlike tenor, the more bluesy ragtime picked ‘Them Bones’ takes on the nature of a traditional folksy nursery rhyme, a cautionary moral lesson that “Whoever you are/Whatever you owe/There’s always someone you’ve gotta please”.
‘Song Of The Wayfarer’ also has a fairytale nature to its story of a wayfaring father and son whose portrait he carried in a locket of gold (“he told me that son of mine would grow up to be/A brother to the wind and as free”) while, echoing the musical form of the opener, ‘April Morning’ is sung from the point of view of the woman left behind (“And you’ll remember all through the years/This very moment when you were here/On a cool and clear and fine April morning”).
Part two, ‘The Man’, opens with the vaguely baroque fingerpicked ‘Courage’ where Roy Harper might be a touchstone, and again carries a lesson in its lyrics (“When my father was a young boy his father said to him/Have no fear of the darkness light a candle in the wind/It takes courage to live it takes courage to learn/To give all we have for so little return/It takes courage to stand in the gathering storm/Defying the world with its voice full of scorn”) as he asks his son “are you ready for the fight”.
There’s a rambling folk feel to ‘Deep Water’, which touches on the inevitability of the child leaving the parent behind (“Deep water between you and me…You’re carried to sea I’m here on dry land/I wait on the shore/While the sun gently warms my face/I’ve stood here before/With my feet in the sand/But I ran from the water’s embrace”), though it was actually informed by a close call his son had with a river near their house.
You might trace echoes of Kipling in the gentle, circling melody of ‘Nobody’s Man (But Your Own)’ and its call to be listen to your own heart (“The man at the top will pay you in gold/To sit at the feet of his throne/Don’t pay him in kind don’t give him your soul/Be nobody’s man but your own”).
More strident is ‘Change The World’ with its realisation that you can’t always be there to protect your child (“I would build a wall around you/But I know it all will fall in time”) as they make their own way in the world, seeking to make it a better place (“in a world of change/You can change the world”).
Another with a Kipling inspiration about how we shape the generations we spawn, the title track hits the higher chiming guitar notes as it talks of the transition from child to man (“I can see my way more clearly/When I lead you by the hand/And you have been the father to the man/I put away the broken toys/The games I played both man and boy/And in a room full of noise/I hear a song/And your eyes so very young/Show me the man I may yet become”).
A quiet and intimate album from the heart, Father To The Man ends with the darkly circular picked lines of ‘When The Song Is Sung’ and the question “And will we meet again/Once more beneath the sun/Will you still be my friend/Whatever wrong I’ve done”, though whether it’s being asked by the father or the son is open to your interpretation and, I suspect, your own position on the genealogical path.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.rupertwatesmusic.com
‘Nobody’s Man (But Your Own)’ – live:
We all give our spare time to run folking.com. Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. If you wish help out and donate something (running costs currently funded by Paul Miles), please click the PayPal link below to send us a small one off payment or a monthly contribution.
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.