When I stumbled across Tim Schmidt on the net I was pretty blown away by his voice and guitar fingerpicking style. It has that down to earth feel and an effortless wow factor that you’d normally associate with the likes of Bert Jansch, Nick Drake and Michael Hurley. They just have that gift and don’t need to work hard for you to connect to that sound.
His ability to capture attention has not exactly been a hard push either. He was gaining popularity without a record or promotion and became Sweden’s best ‘Unsigned Act 2008’ selected from over 85,000 myspace profiles, no mean feat although I pity anyone slugging through a very worn out myspace today. Tim’s new album ‘YaYa River‘ was released in April this year and will be featuring in our playlist.
Tim is really making his own path, sure there are inspirations from the American and English folk scene, but it has such an uncommercial and carefree feel, it’s a great big breath of fresh air that restores your faith in the contemporary folk scene which has been made more commercial of late.
The use of vocal sounds matches guitar perfectly sounding like a second instrument at times. Other instruments join in as well although it is, in the main, an acoustic album. The most musically diverse is kept for the shortest track ‘Golden arizona’ which is more of an interlude. Most tracks are under three minutes which seems perfect as some tracks such as ‘O Crow Jane O Crow kane’ are wondefully sparse on lyrics. This is an uncluttered album, the beauty of which is akin to that of a Haiku. This is an album to escape to and if you come away feeling elated it’s maybe because you’ve allowed your life to slow down for a while…
Tracks
Listen to the Whole Album: