Turner Cody and the Soldiers of Love – Friends in High Places
Capitane Records – 4 June 2021
Friends in High Places is a collaboration born of two 2017 shows in Canada with Belgian singer-songwriter Nicolas Michaux and his band The Soldiers Of Love (Clement Nourry, Ted Clark, Morgan Vigilante). It is Turner Cody’s fifteenth album, produced by Michaux who dresses up the now St Louis-based New York anti-folk scene veteran’s folk-rock-country songs of love, loss and alienation in a new minimalist musical wardrobe with an easy-going old school barroom country heritage that draws from the bottles poured by Hank, Waylon and George.
The deck’s laid out from the start with the slow walking beat of Boozing and Losing, a musing on both a personal (“I don’t know what to do to be your man/So I bury all my days in dead end alleyways/Infinite delays and empty cans”) and political (“As a bitter wind blows throughout the land…that same thing is broke in me that’s broke in all mankind“) sense of dislocation, fading out on an extended electric guitar solo.
A similar commentary informs the slow waltzing The Four Thousand Dollar Days where he sings “Our four thousand dollar days are over/And we’re back fishing dimes from the jar/We say goodbye to buying wine and roses/And goodbye to throwing dough on the bar/One of us picks up a clover/And the other one patiently prays”, which could be as much about economic upheaval as a relationship that’s reached the end of its credit limit.
Things get bluesier with Lonely Days In Hollywood, which, again draws a somewhat disconsolate picture of life where your dreams are exploited by others (“Swollen dreams and discontent keep me up all night/I’d risk any accident just to get it right/They bleed me of every cent but say my future’s bright”), and those smiles are always fake (“Everyone is always nice and everything is fine/But every tongue is cold as ice and caught up in a bind”).
You should be getting the general mood by now, one of dejection and the fading of that first flush, and it’s underscored again with In The Beginning with the added downer of getting older and losing the spark (“Back in the days when my spirits were high/And the ladies played dress up for catching your eye/You would say in those days/“Who’s that carefree guy always grinning?”/But now that old smile is the smile of a clown/And my heart it is low and my spirits are down/And my limbs are like lead/And my hangover head’s always spinning”) as it waltzes with a Cohenesque wryness.
Anchored by a walking drum beat and pizzicato notes, Mr. Wrong has a similar screenplay but cast as a Western (“underneath the buzzards circling the sun/In the footsteps of an outlaw on the run”) in its rueful self-examination, the narrator a lawman “on the trail of a man named Mr. Wrong”, who is, of course, himself (“Thin whispers of the man I pick up where I can/But I don’t know who he is or where he’s from/And the figure in the mirror says, “what you doing here?”/And I never meant to do the things I’ve done/And I’m cursing the person I’ve become”).
He returns to the inevitably of ageing (“everything around me’s getting newer”) for Telling Stories, one of the few musically upbeat numbers with shuffling drums and some great guitar lines from Nourry and, again extending the perspective from the personal (“I recall a time when me and you were/Making bets on eternity”) drawing again on cinematic imagery to take in social commentary (“The gun was hid inside the maid’s gray bonnet/The family’s country mansion is for sale/The bankers and the nouveaux riches all want it/The drunken old aristocrat’s in jail|/And the audience all think they know who did it”) with the line “Word is there will be a general pardon/For everyone who toes the party line” surely a veiled Trump allusion.
For all the downbeat sketches, Cody’s lyrics are veined with playful droll humour, wonderfully so on the midtempo cowboy lope of Friends in High Places (“I’m short on tomorrow but I’m long on yesterday”) that has a vague touch of Kinky Friedman about it. It remains musically frothy for the Jonathan Richman-like What I Tell You, a number with a rare upbeat lyric to match (“It’s good when everybody’s happy/It’s good when everybody’s home/When my head’s on your pillow/And my heart’s on your cornerstone… And the tears of old misfortunes/Are all used up and dryin’”). It can’t last of course, as, snapping at its heels comes the slow shuffling, Dylan-tinted Love In Vain (“I get my dues and just rewards/In daily blues and crying shame/I lost a limb, now I’m using yours/My pair of twos is a losing game”) and, continuing the gambling imagery, the scuffed dusty Van Zandt folksinesss of the weary melancholia-steeped Nothing But Regrets (“I don’t know how this old hat/Came to lay such weight on me/When once upon a time it was the thing that set me free/And this beat up guitar now tells the story in its frets/Of a lifetime of living with nothing but regrets”) where he namechecks one of his core American songwriter influences, Stephen Foster.
And so it ends with vibraphone tinkling through the delightful, falsetto-sung waltzing cowboy lullaby Drink A Toast in Heaven, looking down on those whose “ship is going under/And drowning in the years” raising a glass “At a barroom of the angels/In the old by and by” in a benediction of “And let it fall on the ones you love”. It slips down easy, sounding as simple, unassuming and effortless as only true songwriting and consummate musicianship can do. Cody may indeed have friends in high places, because there’s a divine spark at work here.
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://turnercody.bandcamp.com/album/friends-in-high-places
Photo Credit: Charles Paulicevich