Philippe Bronchtein – Me and the Moon
Self Released – 5 October 2018
Hip Hatchet, the Portland singer-songwriter, now makes his debut under his own name of Philippe Bronchtein, a move that might prove risky among fans who never read album credits, but which is sure to earn a fulsome reception among long-time admirers and those discovering him for the first time.
His voice is dusty, world-weary and intimate, a melancholic caress, his guitar work simple and uncluttered. The sparse arrangements are variously coloured with keyboards, Jason Montgomery on pedal steel and dobro with harmonies from Anna Hoone. The album is very much the work of a travelling troubadour reflecting on the miles covered and wondering about the worth of the journey, of how, as he puts it in the desert night widescreen feel of The Joy of Repetition, he’s “been pushing my luck for too long”, feeling “like a memory, one that can’t brave the fires of time and stone.”
Prompting thoughts of Townes Van Zant, the album opens with the title track (apparently written after spending the night in his truck during a tour plagued with disasters) and its ambivalent emotions about the freedom of a nomadic life, staring up at the desert sky and “confiding in the stars just me and the moon” or “Drinking for free in a new town each night with my sleeves both rolled up” set against “But the trees here ain’t green and a truck’s not a home. I keep telling myself, this is the life I chose.”
A similar sentiment informs the near murmured It’ll Do with its sparse Cohen-like guitar work, a song about dreams (wife, home, family) that never came true, but also about accepting that “It ain’t much worth holding onto, but it’ll do, it’ll do.”
The mood lightens both musically and, it would seem, lyrically for the fingerpicked Home Again and friends glad to see the narrator back, but it’s leavened by the realisation that the prodigal’s given up his wandering because he’s tired of being “older by the day and more tired by the town”, of “looking back on a life I could’ve had”, his return more a resignation than a reaffirmation.
Echoed by aching pedal steel, thoughts of loss and what might have been also run through Kitchen Window, memories of a break-up the character in the story never saw coming, “listening to you leaving with masculine reserve” and how “these days I batten down the hatches. Don’t let my mind wander off at all, cause when I remember her it’s just the memory that I recall”, singing through the hurt down at the karaoke bar with Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.
Once again, accepting the skin you live in and the life that goes with the job (“things ain’t good but they’re all right”) are part and parcel of the dobro-backed, huskily sung Mountain Cadence, the emptiness of one night relationships with a girl who likes the way you talk and how “details are irrelevant when you sing a melody delivered with the cadence of a hundred swaying trees.”
Given the mention of places like Idaho, Seattle, Tennessee and Amarillo, it comes as a bit of a surprise on the nimbly fingerpicked and folksy Ginger Tea and Wine to find him in “a motel room in Cornwall” and then in Ireland waking up “in the Midlands on a mattress on the floor, hazy ’bout my whereabouts and the night before”, but, reminiscent of Jackson C. Frank, once again it’s the solitude of never putting down roots, the line “between the man I am and the man I want to be”, of “another empty barroom another night alone, another night of wondering, why I left my home.”
Evoking the dry and cracked mood of Springsteen’s Nebraska, it closes with I’m A Runner, a song which picks up that thread of being unable or scared to make a commitment, always “staring down yellow double lines holding my breath and doing my best not to look behind” and how “leaving came easy, it’s the being gone that’s hard.”
Bronchtein talks of the distance between longing and living in a way that cannot fail to strike a chord in anyone who’s questioned who they are or why the work /life balance is so weighted to the former side of the scales, of being, metaphorically, able to “put your hand to the plow and earn no more than you need.” At the end of the day, it’s the dreams of the ‘what if’ and accepting the ‘what is’ that keeps us going. As he so eloquently puts it, “It may never have been, but it’s praises I’ll sing with a voice, softened by ease.” Listen to it
https://soundcloud.com/hiphatchet/me-and-the-moon
For more information and upcoming tour dates, visit: http://philippebronchtein.com