Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards – Live In Manitoba
Nobody’s Favorite Records – 1 March 2019 (UK Release)
Hailing from Massachusetts, Mark Mandeville and Raianne Richards are big on the eastern coast of America and Canada, indeed, this, their third album, was recorded at a series of Manitoba house concerts organised through Home Routes.
Drawing on material from their two studio albums, a brace of covers and one previously unrecorded song, it’s a warm, relaxed and intimate collection, the five sets punctuated with witty introductions.
They kick off, Mark taking lead, with Hang On To The Day, about time passing and not paying attention to things we’ll later miss, followed on by the duo harmonising on Loose Stones In the Gravel, a number reminiscent of Dylan’s Tomorrow Is A Long Time, an equally Dylanesque That’s The Way It Goes and Raianna taking over the vocals for the jaunty ukulele strum of Don’t Ever Stop Believing.
A love song written for Raianne, Hand I Hold opens the second set with echoes of Gordon Lightfoot, leading into the duetted melancholia of Grain By Grain, a travelling song which features Raianne on clarinet and a Neil Young-like lonesome harmonica break.
The harmonica is there again, as is ukulele, on the more musically uptempo That Old Machine which, sung by Raianne and drawing on their background in mill and factory towns, addresses the decline of manufacturing, the first of the covers coming with a yearningly harmonised version of Tom Petty’s Walls.
Every summer for the past nine years, the duo have embarked on a Massachusetts Walking Tour, quite literally walking between shows and playing free community concerts, so far notching up over 100 towns to date, as detailed in the prelude to the Richards-penned One More Mile, a particularly folksy number with fairly self-evident origins.
The intro to the fourth three-track set has Mark encouraging the audience to join in on the title refrain of It Won’t Be Written On My Grave, the Irish colours of the whistle intermingling with strong Guthrie influences. A slower strum, the roots-country If Someone Will Come With Me I’ll Go has Rainne sounding a little like Emmylou on her harmonies while the section ends with the otherwise unrecorded plaintive fingerpicked As Long As It Takes where hints of Townes van Zandt seep between the cracks.
The fifth and final selection is introduced by Mark talking about the problems of trying to give music lessons in an old building with ‘ridiculously loud’ fellow tenants, such as having a gym right above them. The point being that, as Paul Simon put it, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor and “the decisions that we make do affect other people”, giving rise to a hymnal-like song about having consideration called Last Tree Standing, and that, if you’re that tree, there’ll always “be someone to cut you down,” Richards’ clarinet underlying the song with the tune to John Brown’s Body to add to its folksy flavour.
The album ends with an unfussy but fine cover of Neil Young’s Unknown Legend, they’re welcome to play my house any time.