Tag: Simon Scardanelli

Born in London and based in Brittany, Underneath The Singing Tree is Scardanelli’s ninth solo album and, a cocktail of heady pop, folk and jazz, one of his strongest. Opening with a swirling Eastern flavour and featuring Sophie Caudin on flute, the title track is a cautionary tale about being so beguiled by thoughts of love that and the promises of a future unknown (“you called me with those deep brown eyes/Said come with me and we can one”) that you don’t see the red flags (“Well it was sweet first and I held you close/I never thought that you’d ever leave … as you kissed me I should have heard that sound cos someone started ringing a bell…now I see the devil in your eye”).

The laid back, slightly jazzed dreamy mood set by Simon Plane’s trumpet, the steady chugging ‘Young And Curious’ speaks to the familiar feeling of wanting to know if the person you broke up with still thinks of you (“There’s got to be a way to find out if you’re missing me/Without giving away the secrets of my soul/I’m not looking for your attention or your sympathy/It’s just a passing thought”)  but is more actually about the way time brings relationship changes (“I never really understood why I stopped loving you/I guess things just happen when you look the other way… we were walking through the fields in a fantasy of make believe/How could we know this innocence would go so soon”) and the regrets that still linger  (“I never took the time to tell you that you’re beautiful/And I never took the time to say don’t walk away”).

Again with trumpet (more of a fairground  feel here) and plucked out on what sounds like ukulele, ‘Here We Go Again’ is a light on its feet reflection on always making the same mistakes in love (“I don’t know why these things keep happening to me/I thought I’d learned a lesson or two but apparently/To break the cycle of love and loss is a fantasy”), a theme carried over into the near six minutes tumblingly fingerpicked ‘Five Seconds Ago Last Year’ (“The table that I set for you has gone/Paints and paper hearts now bleed for one/Who never stood a chance it was decided -Out of my hands/All change – make other plans that do not include me”).

More musically upbeat with cajon and clarinet, a jaunty cabaret groove and catchy chorus ’The Glittering Prize’  is about coming to realise you’re not the one with all the answers you thought you were when you were younger and how being focused  on the goal (“everything I ever wanted to be was wrapped up in a glittering prize”) led you to be blind to everything around you (“I was born to be wilderment’s captain/I was born to be chaos theory‘s muse/I was born to be beguiled and uncertain/It’s no surprise that I was born to be confused”), confessing “now I know that it’s smarter to be dumb/and the clever guys are keeping schtum…and every clever song you thought that I wrote/is just a load of words on play”.

Later this year, he’s hoping to release his new folk-opera, La Mer,  for which, led by a repeated mandolin riff, clanking percussion and with a stronger traditional folk flavour , building in intensity, ‘Battle Ships’ serves as a taster set, as the title suggests, in time of war (“let’s blood this sea red we’ll hunt down these cold men ‘o war ’til the devil’s dead!”).

It’s back to matters of the heart for the quieter acoustic fingerpicked ‘Everything Is Going To Be Fine’, this time of a more optimistic persuasion (“We each have got our stories – all our victories and our failures too/and somewhere in the middle where we meet there’s a place to be true/I can make a masterpiece – a work of art – if you/Lend me your perfection and just one tiny piece of your heart”)  while not expecting the world (“We can talk all night about how we shouldn’t plan for love/And taking it one day at a time – well that’ll work for us”) because “you and I know better than that/that would be like making plans/And we said we would never do that”.

Caudin back on flute, ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ is, as the title implies, another fleet of musical foot number, caught up in the simple joy of terpsichorean abandon (“There’s nowhere that I’d rather be/Than locked arm in arm to a tune in three…Let us go dancing and jive ’til our clothes are a mess/I’m no John Travolta but really I couldn’t care less/I’ll put on my best shiny boots/And glide round the dance floor in Cuban hoops”), making up for a serious-minded youth (“When I was young I never had fun/On the dance floor I wore a red face

Now I’m all grown up and depending on luck!- I intend to grow old in disgrace)” as it waltzes into moves of a more carnal nature (“when we’re done dancing exhausted we’ll/Slide into bed/But never too weary to dance with our fingers instead/Exploring the moves we forgot/To try on the dance floor”).

The buoyancy doesn’t last though, opening with flute, the acoustic guitar-based ruminative ‘Driftwood’ with its descending scales returns to a desolate emotional landscape as it sketches a brief ships in the night liaison (“I’m not your lover or your golden boy/That honour lies beside a better man/I’m just like driftwood on a foreign shore/Good enough to light a fire after dark, or when the tides are low/or sing a moonlit rhyme on sinking sand/All trace of us will soon be washed away”). It ends with the (autobiographical) confession of  the intricately and tumblingly picked ‘Heart Upon My Fretboard’ with a very definite Gallic air in the Paris café balladeering manner of Aznavour or Gainsbourg  and, as you’d expect, musical imagery (“I’ve always worn my heart upon my fretboard/And you can see the scars all down my neck/Is there one for every love? I can’t remember/But the deepest cut’s the one I can’t forget”) and an introspective existential crisis streak (“I’ve sometimes been a man of easy virtue/a pleasure seeking thrill I can’t resist/To slide between the sheets with perfect strangers/The sex and dopamine is such a fix/And maybe that’s a substitute for something/That I’ve been searching long and hard to find/I wouldn’t say that I’ve been disappointed/But there’s always someone different in my mind)”, wrapping it up in a metaphor with “how my fingers crawled across that desert/In an endless search for perfect harmony”.  The singing tree bears some fine fruit, you should shelter a while beneath its branches.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.songman.org

‘Battle Ships’ – official video: