Danny Schmidt – Standard Deviation
Live Once Records – 29 March 2019
His first release since 2016, his ninth solo album (he also records with wife Carrie Elkin) finds Schmidt in a reflective mood, ranging from joy to melancholy on an album bookended by the birth of a child and the loss of one.
Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin, percussionist Colin Agnew and with Elkin and all three members of The Sea The Sea on background vocals and harmonies, it opens with the delicate fingerpicked Just Wait Till They See You, a circular melody lullaby evoking his euphoria at the birth of their daughter, Mazie, in September 2016.
Moving to a more intricate musical structure, the breathily sung Words Are Hooks is both a celebration and a caution about the power of words to impact on people’s emotions, bringing healing or causing harm, and a reminder that, “the hoof prints through the sands of time”, they should be used truthfully.
At nearly six minutes, the folksy fingerpicked Prine-like acoustic title track with its tumbling chords is the longest in the set and testament to Schmidt’s songwriting craft that he can weave themes of romance, gender discrimination, the sexiness of a smart mind and finding an intellectual soulmate (“she grabbed her by the brainstem and she threw her to the floor/And they kissed like their equations had never balanced quite before”) in a song that draws on theoretical physics, string theory, quantum mechanics and descriptive statistics for its inspiration.
He returns to Mazie’s birth on the gentle Blue-Eyed Hole In Time, pedal steel washing across a lyric about how first locking eyed on your newborn child transforms your identity forever into a that of a parent. Indeed, transformation underpins several numbers here. In the case of the slow waltz strum Newport ’65, which features harmonica homage from Southpaw Jones, it’s the concert where Dylan went electric, to cries of ‘Judas’ from the crowd, Schmidt describing it as the moment he went “from the flag bearer of the folk movement to the stream-of-consciousness channeler of the youth culture’s rising malaise.”
Reworking lines from The Times They Are A Changin’, (“Come gather round people wherever you roam/And admit that you’ve stripped your own god to the bone/And accept it that soon you’ll be praying alone/Like you never had listened at all”), the song extends its commentary to talk of how artists are often imprisoned by the expectations of their audience (“every new road’s a betrayal of proof”) and that moving beyond that identity can see them nailed to the cross.
If Dylan’s transformation was positive, the cowboy country trot of Agents of Change addresses the negative aspects of gentrification and the blindly oblivious pursuit of self-betterment. Inspired by how upscaling in their neighbourhood meant that one of the friends could no longer afford to live there, it touches on the complicity of those embracing the change (“for a tiny slice of pie/I became that guy”) as he sings:
The neighbor’s house is burning
With flames that rise so fast and mean
The white folks run with empty buckets
And tears of gasoline
I hang my head and blame the others
With a match stick in my teeth
concluding that “what’s the point of castle towers/With all your friends outside?”
Taken at a jauntier shuffling gospel blues tempo, the fiddle-coloured Last Man Standing comes at things from a different angle, about how a journey to change always begins with the first step, of the need for self-examination and the owning of mistakes made, of, as Tim Hardin put, finding a reason to believe and not always settling for a “brand new shovel but the same old hole.”
By way of a tangent, the more countrified, fiddle-featured The Longest Way was commissioned for Less Traveled: A Journey from Pine to Palm, a documentary about travelling down the century-old Jefferson Highway, from Winnipeg to New Orleans, in a 1954 Dodge, the song about the old school communities that exist between the main roads and biggest highways, and taking time out from motoring to keep up with modern life. Given that it mentions sitting down to mama’s cooking, it seems appropriate to follow on with the slow waltzing Bones of Emotion, a cosily warm snapshot of a mother contemplating her family at Christmas-time.
As it opened with a birth, it ends with the simple, whisperingly sung strum of We Need A Better Word, a heartbreaking song about miscarriages, inspired by both their own and of friends, and how the term carries with it a suggestion of blame and failure (“It’s just a word, as if she dropped it on the floor/It’s just a word, as if it’s something she did wrong”) and how there should be a better way of talking about things and describing the loss and pain of the tragedy.
The title referring to a quantity expressing by how much the members of a group differ from the mean value for the group, serving here as a metaphor for individuality within a shared community, simple, insightful, heartfelt and lyrical, this deserves to rank among the year’s finest releases.
Danny is touring Netherlands, Germany, UK & Spain in April/May. Visit his website for details http://www.dannyschmidt.com
Photo Credit: Chris Carson