Stephen Fearing – The Unconquerable Past
Fish Records – 31 January 2020
Stephen Fearing’s 13th solo album finds the Canadian songsmith in a musically mellow mood, even though the instrumentation and arrangements are more layered than his familiar acoustic setting. Lyrically, however, the album’s reflection on a period of transition in both his and the planet’s life means the lyrics aren’t always quite as laid back.
It starts, though, on a wistful note with Break Our Mother’s Heart, a gently strummed reflection on how pursuing goals almost always means leaving something or someone behind, especially if you happen to be a troubadour, as he sings “I left my hometown for salvation”, but that they or it will still always be a part of you. His voice is warm and smooth, edged with regret, recalling perhaps James Taylor although elsewhere on the album you might find yourself thinking of Tom Paxton, John Stewart or even the softer side of Elvis Costello.
It’s a theme that spills over into the pedal steel- accompanied understated shuffle of Gold On The River with its notion of prospecting through life, looking to find whatever it is that drives you on, measuring the bitter with the sweet, perhaps looking but never learning to see, and coming to understand that time “is a taker and giver” as mortality weighs down (“when I finally I found the stillness in myself, I started wondering just how many years were left upon the shelf”).
He hits a Springsteen rocking stride on Stay With Me, although he cites Ben E. King’s Stand By Me as its biggest influence, but then comes the first of the more pointed comment songs with Marie, a song that addresses the coming shit show and people venting their opinions on social media, with, as he’s described it, a breathtaking “degree of misogyny, racism and bigotry bubbling under a thick veneer of ignorance”, declaring “fuck those greedy liars” led by those with the power and the glory and their “tinfoil hat religion and their dark conspiracies” warning that “the brownshirts are back”.
The sentiment finds even sharper expression on the organ-backed, steel-shaded soulful groove title track (which may well have musical relatives in Spanish Harlem) about today’s tension, essentially restating how those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, drawing on the image of how he once put his arm through a plate glass window and, some months later, a shard surfaced, the “smithereen of glass, memories beneath the suture”.
And yet, there’s hope too. On Marie he talks how even a broken clock can tell the time twice a day, and, while we may be “out of time and out of gas”, he concludes here that we should “take it on the chin, and learn to start again”.
Likewise, the slow soulful Someone Else’s Shoes, his voice soaring to falsetto on “no one is an island”, he sings of how we need to find the capacity for empathy if we want to find the path to love while, featuring just acoustic guitar and harmonica, Sunny spins a poignant story of courage and love, of a mother, the wife of a hard ticket man, and her support of her troubled transgender son and his love for a heterosexual male lover (in whose voice the song is sung), giving him her savings to “help to pay for the life you hope to find” as he sings “heaven help the desperate soul who gambles on living their whole life as someone else”.
The pace kicks back up again for the good time rollicking Christine, Julian Bradford on upright bass, its Good Golly Miss Molly rock ‘n’ roll Little Richard framework a clear departure from the surrounding numbers even if the line “You never know how strong she is until the water’s hot” is not, before the album standout, Emigrant Song. A fare thee well number he co-wrote and previously recorded with Andy White in 2012, Jim Hoke brings a Celtic-flavoured slow march beat arrangement with tin whistle on a haunting song about being forced to leave a fickle homeland that no longer wants you, with an uncertain future and past to which you cannot return, seeking a place “where someone needs me”, yet the heart still tied to a “beautiful country, even when you’re at your worst”. The line “I still love you, that is why I cannot stay” surely expressing the feeling of many in Trump’s America.
Chiming with the same sentiments, it ends with a cover, producer Scott Nolan’s acoustic waltzer No Country, a song of displacement where “all I have in this world is my word and my name” and “forgiveness might be all that we get” that draws on the lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty as, even as they stumble, a reminder to those more fortunate that “if this isn’t privilege then what’s it all for?” An album that grows on you the more you listen, the message is clear, while the past may seem to be unconquerable, that’s no reason to give up the fight.
STEPHEN FEARING · JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 UK/EUROPEAN TOUR
(S) Solo (SF & TS) Stephen Fearing & The Sentimentals (MC Hansen: guitar, vocals, Nikolaj Wolf: bass, vocals & Jacob Chano: drums, vocals)
January
Thu 23 Sheffield Café No. 9 (S)
Fri 24 Southport House Concert, Grateful Fred’s Roots & Acoustic Nights (S)
Sun 26 Exeter Exeter Phoenix (S)
Mon 27 Sutton Poyntz, Dorset Mission Hall (S)
Wed 29 London The Moth Club, Hackney (SF & TS) AmericanaFest UK Showcase
February
Sat 1 Eccleshall, Staffs. The Royal Oak (S) co-headline with Kyshona
Mon 3 Birmingham Kitchen Garden Café (SF & TS)
Tue 4 London Green Note (SF & TS)
Wed 5 Leicester The Musician (SF & TS)
Thu 6 Manchester Gullivers (SF & TS)
Fri 7 Bewdley, Worcs. St George’s Hall (SF & TS)
Sat 8 Hepworth, W. Yorks. Hepworth Village Hall (SF & TS)
Sun 9 Teddington Landmark Arts Centre (SF & TS)
Thu 13 Eskildstrup, DK Folk in the Henhouse (S)
Fri 14 Norderstedt, DE Music Star (SF & TS)
Sat 15 Leusden, NL Fort 33 / In The Woods (SF & TS)
Mon 17 Eindhoven, NL Meneer Frits (SF & TS)
Tue 18 Leiden, NL Qbus / Muziekhuis (SF & TS)
Photo Credit Jen Squires