Tag: Bill Golembeski

The Lost Notes’ Good Luck Shoes is softly brilliant Americana folk music – all the way from Moseley, Birmingham. Odd, for those of us with Midwestern American Anglophile souls who dream of someday visiting a romantic-sounding very British idyll like, perhaps, the North Norfolk village of Great Snoring, by the River Stiffkey (with the promise of a sublime meat pie!), it’s a boggle to hear the great Ray Davies (of “God save the Village Green” fame!) sing, “I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy/But my heart lies in West Virginia”. But, indeed, life is “a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world”. And, thankfully, The Lost Notes play that “mixed up, muddled up, shook up” great Americana music. Indeed, many folk songs swim in the mystery of Gordon Lightfoot’s folk perfection of ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’. But, these tunes bubble to the surface, as their melodies defy Great Lakes water gravity, and sing with a delicate (and sometimes quite vibrant) universal acoustic touch.

But that’s just the folk music way.

Ben Miller sings the first two songs. ‘Don’t Try It On Me’ has a comfortable melody wrapped in “a nightmare that I fight”. It’s a clever juxtaposition. And the acoustic guitar work is sublime (just like my before-mentioned Midwestern Great Snoring Anglophile dreamt meat pie!). Then, ‘Run Like A River’ is an up-tempo tale about another outlaw who “heads to the Badlands with my grandpa’s pick-up truck”, to avoid “getting hanged from the cottonwood tree”.

A similar (but less desperate) travel metaphor flows through the joyous ‘I’ll Be The River”.

Indeed, we Americans are truly “Born to run”.

Ah – Lucy Mills sings the gorgeous ‘Mine Is The Heart’, which deals a “topper most of the popper most” melodic acoustic poker hand with a perfect heart flushed perfection.

A few songs stitch a nice antiquated sampler. ‘No Place Like Home’ is that comfortable melody without any “nightmare”. This is, to quote Bernie Taupin, “Country Comfort”. The song chimes like an heir-loomed family grandfather clock. And ‘God Loves A Sinner’ is a street corner secular prayer, with a soulful plea to “right this love gone wrong”. Then, the ironic up-tempo ‘Slow Down’ brightens the tone with its quick pace that recalls the joy of Paul Simon’s ‘Me And Julio Down At The Schoolyard’. Nice.

But the drama returns. The forceful ‘I’ll Be The River’ is a classic West Coast 70’s pure folk-rock distilled sunshine-voiced elixir, with mandolin magic to burn. But then there’s the morning after: ‘Whiskey For Breakfast’ is a deep physiological venture into a scarred marriage where “nights are too short and days are too long”, with a lover’s confession that “I’m just a nail in your coffin”. This is, to quote the also great John Martyn, “grace and danger” stuff.

Thankfully, ‘Let It Rain’, with its droplets of deep bass notes, has more redemptive promise.

The final song, ‘Wildman’, thumps with the acoustic danger that (with trumpet fanfare!) gets defiant with a nice buoyant final groove.

To quote the wonderful press release, “In a nutshell, Good Luck Shoes features ten new songs spotlighting tales of the wary, the hopeful, the loved and the loveable; the wild and the lost, the unhinged and the crossed. The fixed up, the torn down, the hoe-downs, the thrown downs, topped by the musings of a deliriously optimistic psychopath with a death wish”. Not only all of that, but vocalist Lucy Mills manages, “on a good day, to play a little cowbell”. This is great Americana music from a Moseley Hillbillies band — without any need for the promise of that sublime God saved “Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards’” meat pie melody offered on any Great Snoring imagined perfect pub lunchtime menu.

Bill Golembeski

Artists’ website: https://www.thelostnotes.co.uk/

‘Don’t Try It On Me’ – live: