Tag: Danny Horn & The Shared Myths

The Death Of Lucy is the third album by Danny Horn & The Shared Myths. It will be released on June 6th. It’s a fun and easy to listen to album. The style is folk-band mixed with Americana mixed with occasional tinges of other genres such as gypsy violin or calypso. It works very well.

The back story is sufficiently complex and interesting that it’s worth telling before moving to the tracks themselves. ‘Lucy’ is Horn’s fictional muse and the name he uses when referring to friends, lovers, enemies, himself, anyone. Horn has also published a book of poems, Lucy and Others.  This album, hence the title, is to be Lucy’s last outing and the album is, then, the attempt to put her to rest – through songs about a toxic love affair which the protagonist wants to get out of whilst also wanting to continue to be deeply involved with (we can no doubt all empathise with this from some point in our lives).

The album opens with ‘Pretenders’ which rather sets the scene:

“And now I see with new found accuracy
What you had to show me
You don’t know me
And you never, ever will”

This and the second track, ‘Keep On Careening Karina’ have been the singles – commercially catchy and giving a sense of Horn’s quirkiness on the one hand and rather neat writing and playing on the other. His band, The Shared Myths, are described as offering, “scorching violin, wild guitars, earthy double bass, beautiful piano and lively percussion as well as tight 4-piece harmonies”. These two tracks capture the energy of the playing.

At first listening, ‘Lorraine Is Exhausted’ is a simple acoustic track, but it pays later listens to better hear the rolling vocal and an arrangement pushed to the back. ‘Stolen Nights in Jericho’ ups the tempo with a pounding drum, a snaking violin and lyrics like, “Evidently I couldn’t face you without time to rehearse … I kissed you like stones in the road”, a musical correlative for the chaos in the singer’s mind.

‘South Korean Style Cauliflower Wings’ is a ridiculously great title for a track with verse rhymes such as, “I’m taking her / Away from Alistair / He threw an ashtray at her / Wednesday night”. There’s a bounciness to this song, and the rhyming style, which has the tinge of calypso style. ‘Deep To My Eyes’ is similarly clever with its rolling, rising, vocal and multiple rhyming lyric. Horn’s background is theatre as much as music, and he has recently been playing the part of Ray Davies in Chicago I the musical, ‘Sunny Afternoon’. The two arts combine well on the album.

‘Radio Play’ is a song you just want to learn to play, the singer having “trebled-cleffed” his story, a combination of, “pride and shame and piano”. Neat.

The album closes, the story closes, presumably ‘Lucy’ concludes, with ‘The Ropes’, a track which has a double-bass driven bebop jazz feel, a swirling violin, and a lyric where the singer is happily leaving until two-thirds of the way through the song where he must respond to Lucy offering another for the road. Like a cessated smoker having ‘just one’ he’s aware of the compromises that may come with it and the album ends with, “Come back, come back, come back to me” (female vocal) sung against “I’m going, I am going” (male vocal) to an increasingly manical musical conclusion.

The Death Of Lucy, then, is sophisticatedly complex, i.e. it’s highly entertaining to listen to – and hence you don’t spot how clever it is on an early listen. In both the writing and the playing, Horn intermingles traditions of theatre, of music, of the lyrical dexterity seen in American music of, say, the later 30’s to the 50’s. The Shared Myths give a lively accompaniment. It’s all rather splendid.

Mike Wistow 

Artist’s website: https://dannyhorn.co.uk/music/

‘Pretenders’ – official video: