Grant-Lee Phillips – Lightning, Show Us Your Stuff
Yep Roc – 4 September 2020
His tenth album since the demise of Grant Lee Buffalo, the title stemming from a defiant remark to the sky by his then 5-year-old daughter seven years earlier, finds Grant-Lee Phillips taking a reflective look at the fragility life in the company of Jay Bellerose on drums, bassist Jennifer Condos and Eric Heywood on pedal steel and guitars with Danny T. Levin colouring in the spaces on horns.
Indeed, it’s warm brass that opens the poppy walking beat of Ain’t Done Yet, a declaration that there’s still life in the old dog, something the remainder of the album goes on to prove. Drawing The Head is a piano-backed, slow waltz-time number, a literal self-portrait as such, sketched in light musical charcoal shades, capturing the lifelines of experience and time passed, moving on to the breathily sung, shuffling Lowest Low about finding yourself at a low ebb and wanting to just hide away and not have to “walk out and fake a smile”.
Upping the volume slightly with Bellarose’s drums proving the anchor, the soulful Leaving The Light On again addresses human weakness (“a man ain’t made to be this strong”) and trying to make your way through and doing your job with the support of a supportive love, essentially a song from the perspective of a musician wearied by life on the road.
Keeping that soulful groove, the slow, gospel-tinged, softly sung Mourning Dove concerns mortality and the aspirations and temptations along the way to the final farewell (“Empty handed you enter/Empty handed you leave/On the long walk, temptation gleams/Like silver coins on money trees”) and to accept the inevitable with a welcoming grace as he sings that one day he’s going to “Lay back and let the cotton clouds go by/White blossom of the mountain laurel/The wild flowers and the smoke bush/No weeping when the mourning dove arrives”.
Another number spawned from life on the road, opening with piano, the smoky late evening simmer of Sometimes You Wake Up in Charleston pretty much speaks for itself, though more generally it’s a rumination on how we end up in the places and conditions that we do.
The only really uptempo track on the album, the swampy preaching blues shuffle Gather Up adopts an end of days approach (“Gather up your children/The earth is reelin’/The seas are bound to swell/The ground, it trembles underneath your feet/Awaken to the warning bell”) laced with an environmental undercurrent before taking the pace down again for the five minutes plus Straight to the Ground. A pedal-steel coloured, gradually swelling song, it finds him drawing on his teenage memories to adopt the voice of a character feeling confined by their small-town upbringing (“Swear I’d like to burn this place straight to the ground/Everything here just reminds me that I’m missing out/I’d love to set a fire to all of it/It ain’t worth a matchstick to me now”) and wanting to take off to a tantalising imagined future (“Out west they sleep under the moon/Have their breakfast brought out by the pool/You never ring them ‘til the afternoon/It’s how they do in Hollywood”) that always seems out of reach.
It ends with, firstly, the slow march rhythm of the piano ballad Coming To which evokes the warmth of the morning sun and domestic contentment, of sleeping sound and the fog lifting from the day and your life, coming out of the wilderness into “the clear light of mercy”. Finally, played on acoustic guitar, there’s a Lovin’ Spoonful jugband feel to Walking In My Sleep with its almost whistling, lullabying pedal steel and wordless backing hums, ending it on a note of acceptance of life as a fever dream that will someday break, but until then, as the album title suggests, you defy the lightning to do its worst.
Lighting, Show Us Your Stuff is now on Yep Roc.
Online Album Launch: Tune into his Facebook artist page September 5th at 3pm ET (8pm UK time) where he will be performing some songs from the new album.