LUDWIG WRIGHT – Turn Of Tides (Left Lane Records TOTO-2023)

Turn Of TidesCheerfulness, Optimism, Joviality – take your pick. Ludwig Wright is a British-German singer-songwriter who has just released Turn Of Tides, to give the album its full title Turn Of Tides Or Where The Waves Come From. The mood of both music and lyrics is delightfully cheery and positive across the thirteen tracks of this album.

It’s not an easy thing to maintain a theme throughout an album, and even harder to keep it going without the listener losing interest. Wright has done both successfully. He describes the background to this album, “For me oceans are simply magical and I’ve always felt this profound ‘Sehnsucht’ for the sea” As a younger person, he made yearly visits to his grandfather in North Devon, “We’d sit on the cliffs for hours, watching the waves hit the shore. Now these memories have flown into this album.”

‘Sehnsucht’ translates as yearning or longing. Anyone who’s lived by, or even just visited, the coast will recognise the moods in this album. There are tracks are called ‘Deep Waters’, ‘Turn of Tides’, Heaven and Ocean Blue’, ‘Lighthouse’, ‘How Many Lands and How Many Seas’, which have an obvious link to the sea but the other tracks have lyrics which also tie the songs back to the main (sorry) theme:

Touch the sand and grow cold
as I go closer to the water
There’s a shock but I’m bold
and I throw myself under water”

You can hear the bouncy finger picking style and the gleeful vocal in ‘Heaven and Ocean Blue’ below but it’s also an example of depth to his lyrics and playing – which makes this a gleeful album without being simplistic or twee.  As Wright urges us in the final track, know ourselves and ‘Start To Sing’:

The world has so much beauty,
so much love and so much more
 Start to sing and I start to dance
I know I can, ‘cause I am who I am

Even if you’re feeling a little down and at odds with the world, this album will make you feel better.

Mike Wistow

Artist’s website:  https://ludwigwright.com

‘Heaven And Ocean Blue’ – official video: