JOE NOLAN : LOST VERSES

JOE NOLAN : LOST VERSES

The Losing Game
This Ain't Love
Hey Anna
Heartbreaker
Killin' All Them Radios
Hardwood Floors
My Old Marie (with Sarah Pagé)
Roll And I Tumble (Voice Memo)
I Don't Have To See You Anymore
Princess Of Dawn
These Old Familiar Places

Label : Fallen Tree Records

Release Date : October 31, 2022

Length : 49:14

Review (Fatea) : Available digitally on Bandcamp now and physically from December 16, this is the seventh album from the Edmonton singer-songwriter and builds on notes collected from his private journals, with thoughts of longing, love and remorse over a young love affair that he torpedoed picked on his signature parlour guitar. Self-produced but featuring contributions from sister Nataya on background vocals, harpist Sarah Pagé and LA multi-instrumentalist COULOU, the latter adding trumpet to the opening 'The Losing Game', a song about looking to lose the small town blues where "all you old rounders and all my bad weather friends" talk about change but never do anything about it, and how "Tonight I'll tie up these highway laces/And watch 'em all burn to vapour/When they ask you why I ain't around/Tell 'em all I skipped town", channelling influences that embrace both 60s folk troubadours and Springsteen. Taking things down to a more ruminative mood with sparse electric guitar motes and muted rumbling background percussion, the world-wearily sung 'This Ain't Love' has a similar underlying theme, only here he's the one left behind ("You were stuck in a rut/Trying to make tomorrow pay/Come down St. Augustine/With the windows broken/Slam the door in my face…You don't come round here much anymore/Sometimes I wonder if you're still alive"). Breaking the five-minute mark, the Dylan-tinged bluesy mid-tempo strummed, echoingly semi-spoken 'Hey Anna' is another song about looking back and regrets ("I remember that show we played/It was on New Year's Eve/I think somebody drugged me/I woke up in a strange world/Yea my head was in a knot and my heart was caught/Little girl you were my whole world/But I blew it baby, with the kiss of death"), and feeling alienated ("Sometimes I feel like when people look at me/They just don't know what to say"). His sister on backing on 'Heartbreaker', to the setting of a short, circling, repeated guitar riff, he describes confusion and uncertainty as like trying to see through the fog of a "cigarette sky", the song again touching on the distance between two people in a relationship ("Those secrets in your eyes/It ain't nothing new/Now you're acting like a stranger"), brief shards of distorted guitar punctuating the frustration of not knowing what to do to break through the barriers ("Should I turn out the lights/Go searching in the dark/Where no one can find/The key to your heart/You don't wanna talk/Well we could just lay here"). There definite Springsteen aching balladry colours to the feel and delivery of 'Killin' All Them Radios', a sense of dislocation and loss once more woven into the lyrics ("I just go on rambling in my way/All the crops left to plow/All the seeds left to sow/Where are you now/ Maybe I ain't meant to know") as he sings "I got all new strings/I'll play 'em just for you". Simply fingerpicked, Hardwood Floors' speaks about being caught between two worlds, reflecting on what was, unsure of what will be ("I'm living in the city/Don't know if it will last/I'm flirting with the future/And still dating the past"), once more steeped with regret for things lost ("it's too late for singing now, I lost you long ago/Still by a thread I'll be hanging out around your back door/And it's too late for dancing, I can't twirl you no more/You won't be dressing up for anything/With my heart on your hardwood floor…As I watch you leave my shoulder to lean on another one"). Joined by Pagé, similar emotions are stirred on the more uptempo picking of the Dylan-shaded old love memories of 'My Old Marie' ("if I could be honest with you/Then I'd have to be honest with myself too…My mind only saw your body/I was blind in some love triangle game/Now tonight your eyes see my pain/I'm drowning in your name") and "chances come and chances gone so soon". His sister again on backing vocals, the slow, choppy percussive guitar rhythm of 'Roll And I Tumble (Voice Memo)' is a dusty, resigned regret road song of a washed-up travelling musician ("I can't remember the last time I slept clean/The nights get longer when the road gets mean/And when I get back you know I only last awhile/Seems wherever I go things just go out of style/I found this jacket from a thrift store in Michigan…Every town feels like a fret on this guitar/Twenty so cities bouncing between the bars") for whom home is just a place in a song. Counted in with the breathy spoken title, again addressed to a lost love, 'I Don't Have To See You Any more' is a slow, folky blues about shaking off the past that keeps you in emotional stasis ("If I don't do something real soon, I'm gonna regret it… I don't get high I just kinda get into whatever/When things go wrong around here it seems I just sing my songs that come to me in dreams") and letting go. Slightly more uptempo in its fingerpicking, the passing of time and relationships takes us towards the close with the bittersweet benediction of 'Princess Of Dawn' ("I don't know where the summer goes/But I hate how it goes away/For me I guess I just couldn't be blessed/Enough to stay") with its benediction signing off "I know it hurts but you must go on and I must go too/Your love will shine all in good time". It ends with the stripped back, ruminative seven-minute plus 'These Old Familiar Places' which pretty much serves to summarise the themes and emotions that have run throughout the album ("I miss all your faces/And I still wanna/Get myself checked in/And get on the straight and narrow") and the fall from days of idealism and the struggle to find redemption ("There was a time when we were innocent/We had the music in our veins/And all that shit we'd use to poison it/Some of that bad blood still remains/I found me a good place to hide out/To keep me clean and dry/And if you're ready to find out/Well come on inside"), the lyric namechecking Neil Young and finding grace and acceptance of what was, is and might be in lines that, as the accompaniment rasps and distorts in squalls, move from "if we never make our masterpiece/That's alright you know/And when you see me back on the streets I hope you say hello" to "Still love you like no other/And I'm so sorry for it all/So I'm taking my time/With keeping in touch/I got a handful of rhymes/You know it's my crutch", ending in the mingling of loss and hope in the line "I visit the old cemetery/Where the sun still shines". Late in the day perhaps, but Lost Verses could well find its way into the year best ofs.