Reg Meuross – Reg Meuross
Stockfisch – 13 July 2018
Last year, Reg was approached by Günter Pauler, the MD of German independent label Stockfisch Records, who had heard his work, to re-record a couple of his songs for the European market. Initially reworking England Green & England Grey and For Sophie (This Beautiful Day), this blossomed into a full album of songs culled from across his career to serve as an introduction to audiences not familiar with his material.
Working with studio session musicians Ian Melrose on guitars and dobro and Antoine Putz on fretless and upright bass along with other assorted contributors, it’s a predominantly an acoustic collection that kicks off with a number from his 2004 debut, Good With His Hands, a poignant number about a son relating memories of his carpenter father who fell apart after his wife left him.
The same album also yields both Jealous, a fairly self-explanatory title featuring piano and Beo Brockhausen on soprano sax, and the final track, the jangling Worry No More, a reminder that, whatever the weight on your shoulders, there is always someone there willing to help ease the burden.
His second album, 2006’s Still, provides one number, Melrose on dobro and Brockhausen again contributing sax to The Man In Edward Hopper’s Bar, the song inspired by Nighthawks, an iconic 1942 Hopper painting of the early hours customers in a fictional downtown bar, Meuross using it as platform to etch the loneliness of the singer far from home. Listening to it in comparison with the original, the passing years have brought a deeper, richer emotional resonance to Reg’s voice that gives the song even greater weight.
From his third album, Dragonfly, comes one of three songs here based on real people and events, And Jesus Wept with its circling guitar chords being a first-person telling of how, in 1916, suffering from shellshock, Harry Farr was executed by a firing squad for cowardice, subsequently, thanks to the unceasing efforts of his daughter and granddaughter, becoming, some 90 years later, the first of 360 soldiers who met the same fate to be granted a posthumous pardon.
Another real-life figure is referenced in the gently swaying bittersweet Looking For Johnnie Ray from All This Longing, the 50s balladeer known as the Prince of Wails serving as the unlucky in love female narrator’s ideal man, someone masculine but not too tough to cry. The album’s also represented by another song of longing and loneliness, Melrose underscoring The Shoreline and the Sea’s plea for a true and constant love with gently aching flute.
Leaves & Feathers is also mined for two love songs, the regret over a broken relationship of I Need You and One Way Ticket To Louise which marries a tale of returning to a lover’s arms with a sketch of broken dreams and a town and its inhabitants caught up in an economic depression. With its reference to factory closures and the dismantling of the NHS, the title track of England Green & England Grey echoes similar sentiments, the album also featuring another factually based song with the slow waltz-time The Band Played ‘Sweet Marie’, here embellished by violin, cello and psaltery rather than the piano of the original. It was inspired by the story of how Maria Robertson bought a violin for her fiancé, Wallace Hartley, the bandleader on the Titanic who, legend has it, played her song as it sank.
Skipping over December, the final choice is from last year’s Faraway People, that being the seven-minute For Sophie, Lucille Chaubard again on cello with Lea Morrison on backing bringing an extra melancholy and warmth to its inspirational tribute to Munich student activist Sophie Scholl who was executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.
I have to confess a certain interest in that I wrote the album sleeve notes, but there’s no bias in declaring it one of the year’s finest releases, both a brilliant introduction to his work for newcomers and a superb collection of reworkings for long-standing admirers.