This Frontier Needs Heroes – Go With The Flow
Independent – Out Now
This Frontier Needs Heroes is the musical alias of Nashville singer-songwriter Brad Laiiretti who’s joined on Go With The Flow by producer Johnny Irion on electric guitar and keys Fruit Bats drummer Brian Kantor, Wes Buckley on bass with Rory Verbrugge providing pedal steel. With the vocals raw and echoey, it opens with the title track, a laid back number about going where life takes you, inspired by floating downstream on tubes on North Florida’s freshwater springs and with a decided John Prine feel to it, fleshed-out by piano and bar-band guitar.
Even more echoey with a desultory feel to the meandering melody is South Dakota. Apparently, the backstory to the song about being randomly kissed by someone from South Dakota on a night out in East Nashville, but who then never returned his phone calls… he somehow manages to translate this into a final verse about an unfinished Crazy Horse sculpture with its line “They stole the gold and traded a dust bowl”.
Featuring slide guitar and a skittish drum beat, the rockabilly shaded Dumb it Down takes a poke at the Nashville song factory trying to get hits by appealing to the lowest common denominator while, keeping the cynicism on the boil, the lazy, walking beat dust country One Mistake takes the view that life is a constant series of fuck ups and you just have to do the best you can.
Keeping in a philosophical frame of mind, touching on Neil Young notes, the shuffling Weak dates back to when he first moved to Nashville, putting himself out there among a new circle while still bruised from an old relationship, keeping the same influence in mind with the bluesy, organ backed sway of Don’t Hate Your Hometown, a song about how it’s fine to move on but looking back in anger will only sour your soul.
As you might suspect, sung in a Cowgirl In The Sand falsetto and accompanied by a brooding acoustic guitar and fluttering keys, When The Muse Comes is about the songwriting process, from which it’s back to relationships with different needs and motivations in the simply strummed, subtly steel shadowed musings of Limit of Love.
There’s not a great deal of political commentary on the album, but he does stoke the fire with the urgent guitar rhythms of the Guthrie-echoing Fossil Fuel Fascists, a song about politics and corporates putting profit before the planet, written after Trump nominated Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
The last track is also the last song he wrote for the album, appropriately enough in Barcelona, the intriguingly titled How Leonard Cohen Learned Guitar which naturally calls the great man to mind in the rolling repeating chords of its sparse, unaccompanied playing. It was inspired, shortly after Cohen’s death, by his coming across his 2011 acceptance speech for the Asturias Prize for Literature in which he related how he learnt from a Spanish Guitarist who later committed suicide. This, in turn, prompted thoughts about the waste of potential futures when you take your own life and, from there, a connection to Cohen’s favourite poet, the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered, likely by Nationalists, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, which, of course, led him back to consider the role of the poet – and singers – in the troubling resurfacing of facism. It’s all a fairly low key, musically introspective affair, but allow it to seep into your soul and you’ll find that the flow will carry you along.
Bandcamp | https://thisfrontierneedsheroes.com/newalbum