Ben Bostick – Grown Up Love
Independent – 20 August 2021
On his previous album, Among The Faceless Crowd, largely built around just his acoustic guitar, Ben Bostick offered a snapshot of a broken America from a disillusioned working man’s perspective, unable to make a living, conjuring thoughts of Chip Taylor and dustbowl Springsteen. His latest is a much more personal affair, the financial shock of the pandemic on a working musician extending its predecessor’s concerns but, more crucially, informed by their eldest daughter, Carmela, being diagnosed with Rett Syndrome, a rare and severe life-changing genetic disorder. His response was to write an album of love songs to help them all get through the trials, one that’s far more lyrically and musically upbeat than you might imagine, given the circumstances.
It’s also a fuller sound with various guests affording more dynamic instrumentation, as evidenced from its opening track Different Woman, which channels Paul Simon’s Gracelands and features Wurlitzer, tenor and alto sax, fretless bass, and backing vocals from The BlackBettys. Inspired by a comment by the author Paolo Coehlo how the woman he was married to was a different woman than the girl he married 40 years ago, it’s a celebration of how love changes over the years, sometimes for the worse, but more often for the better, as we become different people, with different dreams and different attitudes, bringing the bonds closer together.
Intimate moments chilling out shared with your other half at the end of a stressful day (“let’s put on a song with a mellow melody/And turn down the light/May the blues and shadows rock you tenderly”), taking things down to a slow waltz shuffle, retaining the brass and backing vocals but adding vibraphone to the mix, Shades of Night is a sensual, soulful ballad, the lyrics of which reference Teddy Pendergrass’s Turn Off the Lights and Dylan’s I Want You with a harmonic progression based around Bach’s Air on a G String.
Written a few weeks prior to the diagnosis, in that eerie prescient moment before the bomb falls and your world is shattered, the stripped-back Lucky Us is just Bostick on guitars and keys, and, while fuelled by the hardship they were suffering, is essentially his variation on There But For Fortune, a song about counting your blessings with the love and relationship you share (“We have our burdens, but they won’t break us/We are more, more than strong enough/Lucky me, lucky you, lucky us”).
And then it lands. Soulful and surprisingly musically uplifting, The Diagnosis was born from the stream of consciousness lyrics shortly after receiving the news. Framed with sax, vibraphone and French horn and based around the same four chords repeating, it opens with the body blow line, “Dreams are made of glass/They shatter so completely and it happens so fast/In a moment go from bliss to bust/The world changes so much faster than us” and captures the sense of feeling lost because “just because you know the truth don’t mean that you know what it means” with science able to identify but not explain, leaving you “Gasping, beating, looking for signs and wonders/Listening for signal in the storm and thunder”, the song looking for an overdose of hope but without ever specifically calling on God or faith.
By way of a departure, with Matt Stoessel’s pedal steel complementing Kathleen Ray’s French horn, it hits the midway mark with Under the Palmetto Moon, a story-song with a Springsteen undercurrent and kindred imagery of restless lovers, bikes and the open road that tells of a couple meeting outside an Amazon warehouse every Friday night to go on a long motorcycle ride under the South Carolina night sky.
Returning to the theme of making the moments last and arranged for just guitar, mellotron and synth strings, If We Only Had Tonight is another unashamed love song to his wife Cari (“If we only had tonight/And the end was really nigh/Like some old disaster film/I would lay you down in bed/Lay my head beside your head/For a moment an eternal kiss/As the world runs out of time/And the image fades to white”), an apology of sorts for the inevitable arguments born of struggling with their daughter’s condition that sweetly drops in a ‘lemon drops melting’ line from Over The Rainbow.
Given everything, however much a brave face you adopt, it’s inevitable that cynicism will at some point poke its fingers into the wound, hence The Myth of Translation which, returning to a Gracelands groove with choppy guitar, gospel backing and musical echoes of Springsteen’s Reason To Believe amid the white reggae addresses of the difficulty of putting thoughts into words with falling into miscommunication, expanding the scope to a social commentary as he sings “We feed our children/All flavors of lies/Sweet deceptions/To mask the taste of life/We teach them to listen/We say go speak your mind/They grow up and leave us/And we wonder why”.
And from cynicism to idealism with A Grown Up Kind of Love which, with acoustic guitars and Rob Burger on accordion, has a decided old fashioned black and white romantic movies soundtrack feel as Bostick milks food imagery for all its worth (“Young love is such a piece of cake/So sweet, but gone so fast/You’re high then you’re low and then stomachache…But our love is like a garden/To be tended and taken care of/Our nourishment never uncertain”).
Sustaining the mood, it winds down with, first, Like Old People Do, just Bostick’s vocals and fingerpicked guitar on a song about slowing things down to avoid burning out and tapping into your inner rocking chair senior citizen, holding hands and taking in the view.
Finally, arranged for fingerpicked acoustic and pedal steel, comes, It Seems Like Only Yesterday, a dreamy vaguely Prine-tinted song that departs from the overall framework in that it was written back in 2015 to mark the first anniversary of his and his wife’s first date at a Halloween party, “a pirate and an angel/Sharing stories and a midnight cigarette”. Is it sentimental? Sure, but I reckon, after the year they’ve had, they deserve that reverie. While rooted in a very personal relationship and set of events, there’s a universality of experience to touch the heart and soul of anyone who’s found themselves faced with similar situations, heartache and the need to find light amid the darkness. It’s a grown up love for mature emotions.
Grown Up Love is released on August 20th, 2021.
More here: https://www.benbostick.com/
https://benbostick.bandcamp.com/