The Deep Hollow – Weary Traveler
Self Released – 9 November 2018
Weary Traveler is a view of life taken at an age where a certain amount of knowledge and experience has already been earned. We have a package of love, love lost, untimely death and personal reflection, all good Americana themes and all available here.
This is The Deep Hollow’s sophomore album as they say (though I probably wouldn’t) and a movement on from the earlier more acoustic sounding album. The harmonies are good, and the bigger production does not swamp the words, ever important with these songs.
The Weary Traveler of the album title reflects the feeling that everywhere you go there are things that have to be dealt with, relationships come and go, places come and go, but this is Real Life, and the aspirations of youth are viewed with a certain amount of disdain: “What are you waiting for – real life to begin?” This is it. This is what it is.
Perhaps nowhere is Real Life more clearly seen than on the streets. On Freedom Street, where the prostitutes, the drug pushers, the users and the drunks mix with the homeless and they are all called to be saved by the Bible carriers. However, the response can usually only be “If you’re saving souls, don’t worry about mine – its always going to be for sale anyway. What I need ain’t no lesson.”
Relationships feature in this collection. Well, I say relationships, but the story is in the breakdown, or, as in the case of Now I See, the possible unravelling of one. It starts out as if it is new love but becomes quite clear that it is a longer relationship and one that might be about to enter that angry and anguished final stage.
By contrast, and another style of tune… you will have seen those double and triple albums of music gathered from all corners of the soft-rock world, with the blue sky, the road disappearing into the distance and the open top Chevy filled with smiling teeth, blond hair blowing in the wind and ne’er a care for sun protection despite the beating rays. Well, something like that. Still, here we have Wide Open Road, a celebration of that era perhaps, but with an edge in the lyrics. Whilst the beat works easily with the 50mph limit, the Wide Open Road represents the opportunity to explore something new, time to move on, “gather your thoughts, take a deep breath, your hand in mine and I’ll do the rest. You’ve done all you can, now you’ve got a friend and the wide open road”.
The optimism doesn’t last for long of course. We learn that Anna’s Gone, a stark lament for a past, lost love. Anna has committed suicide, and you don’t go to bed at night. She said that life is beautiful, but life is also cruel. She knew how hers would end; you didn’t. Couldn’t.
Misery may not fuel the entire album but, as some may say, misery goes with the territory. English folk does melancholy, but Americana in all its forms does misery well. Tell it like it is but add a good beat or a bit of a swing, or something. In many ways, this adds to the sadness, the fact that you think ‘Oh this is a jolly tune. Here I am tapping my feet’, and then you listen properly to the words and you find out that How To Make A Living is not about the joys of getting a job and progressing through a thriving career but is about the everyday story of promise unfulfilled. Young lovers getting together, getting pregnant, getting into a job to do the right thing, knowing that that is the important thing. The opposite view to that in Real Life or rather Real Life from the protagonists view.
A really interesting album, one with which I have had an off/on relationship – possibly quite appropriate given the lyric content. I heard the first track a few times and really liked it. I heard the second track and thought, yes this is going to be a good album. Then as I ventured further in, I got more and more disheartened. But, I didn’t listen, I only heard the music, did not listen to the words, consider the relationship between the words and the music.
Here we have an album of what may be called roots music but actually, it is full of interest and enjoyment – enjoyment in the same way that we like the melancholia of English song. The tunes reflect the recent history of the genre, the words are real stories. Even if they are fiction, we can read such tales every day in the news. Play this album, but also listen, pay attention – and perhaps we should all go for the Wide Open Road to reinvigorate the Weary Traveler in us all.