Heath Cullen – Springtime In The Heart
5×9 Records – 26 March 2021
Heath Cullen‘s Springtime In The Heart finally getting a full physical release after its soft Bandcamp and website appearance last year. It was recorded (in just three days without any rehearsals) in L.A. and produced by Joe Henry with Jay Belarose on drums, Adam Levy on guitar, bassist Jennifer Condos and Levon Henry supplying reed. Springtime In The Heart is the first new material by the husky-voiced Candelo, New South Wales-based Americana singer-songwriter in five years. As the title of the steady slowly chugging opening track, Things Are Looking Up, suggests there’s a general thread of optimism and hope, even in the face of our own self-destructive natures, or, as Cullen puts it “It’s a miracle, this world/it grew right up out of the ground/we are seven billion monkeys/burning it all down/We are Mother Nature’s big mistake/we are her Frankenstein/we’ve got to fight to give more than we take”.
Guessingly informed by the bush fires around the time of its writing, The Song Always Remembers again hews to positivism (“the smoke has cleared from where it hung and far away a tune is rising”), a reminder of the power of music and song to carry truths and inspiration. It’s a theme carried across with a different slant in the slow slouch of Song That I Know, the biblical-tinged lyrics penned by Henry about how “as cities burn down by the big harvest moon that rolls to the street like a birthday balloon but the song that I know carries on”.
Backed by sparse, dry scratchy, percussion, occasional piano notes, brushed snares and a guitar chug creating a prairie and tumbleweeds feel, Cowboy Truths (For Sam Shepard) was written on the night of his passing in 2017. The song lies somewhere between a prayer and a creed (“a cowboy must always be kind/kind of word and kind of deed”). It’s followed by the piano-backed slow swaying Don’t Hurry Your Heart, a love song benediction about taking your time to ensure things unfold as they should (“here’s to good fortune/here’s to your health/you can’t tell the tale/you must let it tell itself/it waits like a bottle/up on the shelf/be sure you’re not too slow to start/but honey, don’t hurry your heart”) that almost sounds like good advice to songwriters.
Another number in which the word-song features, there’s a bluesier, jazzy lope to The Shape Of Your Name, like a less gothic Nick Cave with more clarinet, turning to more romantic imagery with the quietly strummed, breathily sung The Last Match (“Baby, we’re the last match in the book/the one you didn’t know was there ’til you looked”). That same search for comfort informs the similarly low key slow waltz of Home (“We all need someplace to hang our hat/what do we have if not that?/and we all need somewhere to return to when we roam/where can we go if not home?”). It’s the last of the original material coming with the heartbeat pulsing rhythm of the bluesy, sax-caressed decidedly Cohenesque title track on which he offers the hard-worn wisdom that “If you would like your tree to bear/the sweetest of its fruits/then you must never carelessly/throw salt upon the roots” and how “I spend my Sundays chopping wood/and tending to the hearth/it’s winter in the heartland/but it’s springtime in the heart”. It ends with a resonator guitar on a cover of Kill Switch, T-Bone Burnett’s hymn to the true reasons for making music as he sings “There are those who play for money, babe/there are those who play for fame/there are still those who only play/for the love of the game”. I think it’s fair to say it’s clear into which of those categories Cullen falls.
It may be springtime in the heart, but Cullen is a master music maker for all its seasons.