Del Barber – Easy Keeper
Acronym Records – 20 September 2019
The title of Del Barber’s new album is a reference to a farm animal that gives more than it takes, or, in other words, being low maintenance. The latest from the Canadian singer-songwriter follows his relocation from Winnipeg back to his rural Manitoba to become a farmer, a move that actually recharged his songwriting and gave him a clearer vision of what he was about.
His stories, informed by his mother’s work as a drug addiction counsellor, taught him to listen to what others were going through. His album is populated by characters juggling flaws and virtues torn between small-town longing and big town regret. Barber’s lived-in, Prine-like drawl opens proceedings with lazing country blues Dancing In The Living Room, essentially about wanting things to get better but not getting off your arse and doing anything about it.
On a vaguely similar note, the slow shuffle Patient Man with its bluesy organ and twangsome guitar is a love song about how while he likes to get on with things, although “It’s half an hour to put your makeup on/And find a pretty pair of shoes/Honey, I don’t like to wait/But somehow I can wait for you.”
The first of his blue tales comes with another heavy Prine-echo on Everyday Life, where, separated from his wife after “She read some emails that were addressed to me” the narrator sings:
I work down at the grocery store
I go to work at 7 get home a little after 4
A man’s supposed to wonder what he’s doing it for
When he’s stocking shelves and sweeping floors.
But, again, it’s another song about not having the get up and go to change a dull but comfortable existence (“If I had wings, you know I’d never fly/It’s too easy living this everyday life…I’m happy here lining up the labels on cans of chunky soup”). Likewise, No Easy Way Out tells of a woman whose worked a gas station forever, where “Guys wander in here lost, sick of the shape they’re in”, who left when a guy held the place up (though it gave her a thrill), but still came back “still hanging around/Looking for an easy way out”.
With Grant Siemens back on resonator guitar and Bill Western on pedal steel, Louise is a musically upbeat love song about the singer’s lover, “a burn barrel feeding, hands and knees sponge squeezing/Corn husking, one of a kind”, who, 20 years earlier, lost her family in a traffic accident but, while it still pains, has adopted the philosophy that “you don’t get to choose when you go /So stand tall on the sunny days cause shit always goes sideways”.
There are several other songs about dealing with the cards life gives you. On Juanita, a pregnant, single woman who has “got habits and a will that got weak with time” is holed up in a roadside motel knowing “There ain’t no chariot swinging high or swinging low/There’s nothing coming but change” as “Somehow a smile and a bump on her belly grows a little bigger each day”.
The frisky fingerpicked romping Ronnie and Rose sketches the story of a woman “a hard as a natural diamond… as tough as a three-dollar steak” and “a drifter and a rounder… a hard time travelling man” who “made his living taking and giving, and picking up aluminium cans”, two misfits who meet in a bar and, while there’s “No place in this cold world they call their own” find happiness with “Saturday nights, a bottle of wine”. Then on a downbeat note, there’s Bill, a young drifter, “but a good hired hand” who, in Blood On The Sand, falls for young Katy Rose but things end tragically on learning she’s marrying another because “Love will break you, but jealousy kills”.
Returning to a more positive outlook, Leads You Home paints a picture of “boys with wild, wandering eyes, kids without an ounce of shame/Always looking for the last word, satisfied by arguments that we could fake” crossing the country “Breaking hearts, forgetting names/High on holy spirits, delusions of James Dean” chasing their thirst for life before coming to “ quit believing in the coins we threw into that well/Cause the bucket couldn’t go down enough to draw the wish that fell” and realising that contentment lies at home.
Again singing about being happy with your lot rather than risking the unknown (“If you run too far you might just disappear”), he gets bluesier again on the chugging Lucky Prairie Stars, counting his lucky ones as he notes how folk “work way too much for twice as much as you need”.
And so, after all this, he winds up with the simply strummed title track, questioning who he is and what he wants, and while he likes “fancy denim, good food, and fine leather/Two-stroke engines that turn over with ease”, wants “to open my hands/Rise with the sun, whine about nothing/Grow this heart just as tall as I can” and to “raise up my child to know just where she’s from/Smile when the west wind blows through her hair”. Taking his inspiration from the endurance of women “the shoulders of peace …Carrying everything; the last, the first, and the least” finally concludes by asking “How much will you pay not to get wet when it rains?” and answers that “There are still good dogs, fast horses, and fish in the rivers /Maybe get wet this one time and see what it brings”.
He’s an easy keeper, and so is his album.
Watch him performing ‘No Easy Way Out’ on CKUA: