Adam Beattie – Somewhere Round The Bend
Independent – 4 December 2020
Somewhere between being part of PicaPica with Josienne Clarke, Sonny Johns and Samantha Whates and a member of Band of Burns, the Aberdeenshire singer-songwriter Adam Beattie has found time to assemble his fifth solo album. On Somewhere Around the Bend, he reflects on the paths travelled so far and is variously accompanied by Adele’s drummer Seb Rochford, double bassist Fred Thomas, Zac Gvi on keys, guitarist Filippo Ferazzoli, Matan Rochlitz on mandolin, assorted violins, woodwind and brass and Fiona Bevan on backing vocals and piano.
The title track gets the ball rolling with resonating guitar and puttering hollow percussion creating a prowling mood about reflecting on an unspoken (well, I said I didn’t love you but that just wasn’t right or just as true as to say that I loved you at first sight) and unconsummated love (I met the love of my life/But we were far too young/We said we’d meet ten years later/But she never rung/Then I got an invite to her wedding), but in the hope paths will cross again.
Lightly fingerpicked guitar and fiddle guides the softly rumbling melody of A Thousand Roads through further reflections on transitory romance (Nature hangs her head/Because she knows/Even the gentlest breeze/With time corrodes) and coming to the end of a shared journey (these old wheels/Are out of steam/Up until now/They have never slowed before). Switching to piano and pizzicato strings, for the waltzing All Of The Love, he again talks of love that’s never found a home (“Just a seed /without the soil to bed down in/A suicide without the lake to drown in”) but veins it with the positivity that, even if hearts have been broken, at some point “love will find you wherever you are”.
There’s a rougher edge to Stripped To The Bone, both musically with its steady drum thump slow march and circling guitar twang and (set in Greece it would appear) in its refugees-from-war-themed lyric. Then, named for and celebrating the town on Italy’s Adriatic coast, Grottamare is a 63-second accordion, cornet and trumpet carousel whirl, the sound of waves leading into the ruminatively picked Sickle Red Moon, another amble through more memories of lost romantic opportunities (friends they summoned me/to sing a song/And before I knew/the chance was gone/You were dancing with another guy) ending with vow that “I promise you this I’ll never miss the chance of a kiss for a song”.
Such fleeting moments permeate the album, again surfacing on the dreamy way of Lovers Old And Lovers New where, if can imagine it, the spirits of Leonard Cohen, Rod Stewart and Nana Mouskouri mingle in an Aberdeenshire burr as he sings of, again, being eventually cast aside (They all knew the ship would sink/But no one likes to think about it) and being reminded of what briefly was while dancing with another in “ the same spot on the floor/Where we’d had our first kiss/all those years before” as he drops in a reference to Billie Holiday’s I’ll Be Seeing You.
Taking a more Celtic air, My Luv Was Here with its distant rumbling percussion continues in similar vein of brief joy followed by a parting (“My love was here and now she’s gone/I am left here in this barren lands/With nothing in my tired old hands”), though with acceptance rather than bitterness (You will go on to inspire those/Like me who’s hearts had almost froze/The greatest gift tho’ we had to part).
Having referenced one jazz standard, he drops in another, The Boy Done Good opening with the line “I don’t want to set the world on fire”, though thematically this is not about igniting a romantic spark but rather about getting a little humble recognition (I just want to get a little word/In the newspaper I used to deliver, something like:”Local boy done good”) as opposed to scrabbling around in the rat race of competition where there’s “So much noise in the air/That even when you can win one’s ear/There’s such a din/that they’ll never really hear you”.
Reflecting on achievements and dreams is also at the heart of the simple, fingerpicked, piano and double bass and 30s/40s balladry of To Conquer The Heart (I wanted to never again/gaze longingly/At any mission I had not the courage to start… I wanted to prove it was the world that fell short not I) that carries a sense of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.
Opening with a drum roll and shuffling along with a slow walking rhythm, Bad Man has an equally old school feel, almost of a Hawaiian or tropical lazing croon that envisions taking off with his love for a life without responsibility “quit your job/And come with me on the run/They can try and ring my bell/But we’ll be long gone… Fruit dripping from the trees/Right above where we lie/Like Adam and Eve”, although the extent of badness is basically having to be kicked out of the bar after closing time rather than coming on all Bonnie and Clyde.
It ends on another romantic note with the resonator guitar intro to All The Gods and, finally, a sense of permanence (Every time we fall in love/It goes a little deeper) as “all the gods sleep soundly now/Knowing you are in my arms” and, while “Tears will come when love begins/And tears will come when old love ends”, of surviving the trials and the fickleness of the gods (“We are on the run from darker times/But we can weather what they send”) and forging something new.
At one point Beattie sings “I just want to play your living room/Sitting round a campfire playing my tunes/Singing my songs on a Paris street/Or in the little bar where the locals meet” and for someone to say “the boy done good“. An album for reverie and relaxing, of raising a glass to what was and a candle to what might be, the boy done good indeed.
Order via Bandcamp: https://adambeattie.bandcamp.com/album/somewhere-round-the-bend-2