Michael McDermott – What In The World
Pauper Sky – 12 June 2020 (UK/Ireland)
Following on from Orphans, Michael McDermott’s collection of stray recordings, featuring Will Kimbrough on guitars and banjo and Heather Lynne Horton on fiddle, he has his rock head on for his latest. The title track opener which delivers a propulsive punch that reflects anger and passion hurtles out of the starting gate as Subterranean Homesick Blues meets We Didn’t Start The Fire. He rattles off lyrics about a new world order with “walls along the border/Kids in cages/Executive orders/Welfare for billionaires/People hungry everywhere”, dropping in references to James Joyce, Paul Revere, the President and Iron Eyes Cody, who, if you didn’t know, was an Italian-American who played Native Americans in 40s and 50s Hollywood movies, as he presciently declares “Dark days coming for the U.S.A.”. There’s also an acoustic demo reprise as the album’s final track, but he still sounds pissed off.
Needing a breather, he takes the pace down for New York, Texas, a trademark McDermott start slow and surge number that spins the story of two lovers, she pregnant, “headed straight into the heart of nowhere”, looking for anywhere better because “your mama always said that/God would bless us…And bless the wayward runners of the road”.
Played out on fingerpicked guitar and quite possibly written from life, Blue Eyed Barmaid puts a spin on the usual barroom confessional of the down on his luck guy pouring out his troubles while the barmaid pours the drinks. Here, he’s the one drinking coffee while she tells him her life story about a broken home, a brother who came home from the war with PTSD and now sleeps drunk on her floor, how she almost joined the circus and has a Sanskrit tattoo that reads “Be the change”.
It’s a song full of casual observational details (“I noticed she was reading Nietzche/I thought, that makes perfect sense/She’d never heard of Del Amitri/But she loved Car Seat Headrest”) and McDermott’s ability to spin an emotionally resonant romantic image such as when she says “I pretend I’m Joan Of Arc/Wandering here in the dark/Looking for some other dragons to be slain”.
He picks up the tempo with the kick beat rhythm of The Things You Want, with its jangling guitars and keyboards, wryly nodding to the comparisons that have dogged his career as he sings “Is that Springsteen or Dylan/That you’re quoting from?” dropping in a reference to Don’t Think Twice on a number that’s basically about appreciating what’s in front of you and that, in his mother’s words of wisdom “Sometimes it seems the things you want/Are already here”.
Considerably more downbeat, both lyrically and in the drums underpinned slow march arrangement, The Veils of Veronica, the title a reference to the Catholic relic supposedly bearing the imprint of Christ’s face is devastating in its telling of someone with mental health issues (“She spoke of Simon Peter/She told me about the voices in her head”) who, in the wake of assorted lovers, bars and her brother’s death, decides “I just don’t wanna be here anymore” and, given the allusion to a gun she kept loaded in her bottom drawer, presumably committed suicide. It ends with another heartbreaking image suicide: “The other day I found a present/I didn’t get to give to her on/Christmas Eve/It was a scarf that I’d bought in Paris/Now each year I’ll leave it for her beneath our Christmas tree”. It could have come straight from a John Irving novel.
The reflective mood continues with the piano-driven Die With Me. A haunting memory of child sexual abuse (“He told me to touch him/So I did/How was I to know/I was just a kid”) and the lingering sense of self-blame and the imperceptible changes, of hiding shame in booze (“One drink was easy/I was two-fisted tough/Three hits were good/Until it was never enough”) before sobering up (“Now, I watch my little girl sleeping/How peacefully she dreams”) as the song moves on to timely talk of intolerance (“Living in this small town/You can’t help but noticing/That people act so different/When they see different colored skin”) and the determination to rise above the scars and the hate.
With Rich Parenti on sax, the musical mood shifts back into an uptempo swing for Contender, a celebration of youthful optimism with the exuberance of a Southside Johnny party night although dreams quickly give way to reality as “Things they didn’t quite work out/I became a slave of doubt/It felt like I was cursed/among the damned” and the admission that “I screwed things up pretty good/Anybody that even stood fairly close to me/Became my enemy/I hurt the ones I loved most/I burned bridges from coast to coast”, ending with the perhaps inevitable “I could have been a contender/Not like the pretender that I am”.
Keeping things moving at a sweat streaming pace, Mother Emmanuel is in full storytelling mode as he recounts the Charleston church massacre on June 17, 2015, in which nine African Americans were killed during Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the oldest black churches in the United States and a civil rights centre, by a 21-year-old white supremacist, reportedly shouting “I’ll give you something to pray about”. It ends recounting the trial at which one of the survivors said “I forgive you son, for the evil that you’ve done But it doesn’t mean I’ll ever understand”, the lyric quoting 1 Peter 4:8 which, if you don’t have your Bible to hand, says “Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins“.
He returns to his personal trials with the acoustic picked No Matter What when he spent his life “Bitching about all the things I could have been” and “snortin’ and a shootin’ into oblivion”, but that was when he was still drinking and, now, looking back and “Counting all the ways that I screwed up again” and realising “That wasn’t who I was meant to be”, the song is a kind of sponsor to those going through similar struggles as he sings “When you feel you’ve had enough/Don’t give up no matter what/You’re worth it”.
Horton was a major part of that epiphany and the last two numbers are for her, first up, on which she plays fiddle, being the walking-beat love song Until I Found You with its strains of Celtic soul, and then the simple acoustic strum and piano accompanied Positively Central Park, where, in a world “On every corner of this town/You watch dreams die without a sound”. In contemplating mortality (and quoting Hamlet), he offers up a gorgeously romantic spark of light and hope and, whether heaven’s in Idaho, Ireland or nowhere, together there’s a love for all eternity. He’s no contender, he’s no pretender, he’s someone who’s been on the canvas and got up to win the fight. And as this album once again proves, he has the heart and soul of a champion who stares truth in the eye and doesn’t flinch.
https://michael-mcdermott.com/
Photo credit: Darin Back