The Lucky Ones – The Lucky Ones
Independent – 3 September 2021
Music genres may originate in a certain area, but that doesn’t mean they’re confined to it. So, while bluegrass may be intrinsically associated with the Appalachians and American South, it has been adopted by artists in places as diverse as the UK and, in this instance, the Yukon, the rugged and sparsely populated region of northwest Canada famed for the Klondike Gold Rush.
The Lucky Ones are a five-piece outfit. Their name is inspired by Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief, comprising guitarist/vocalists JD McCallen and Ian Smith, singer and mandolinist Ryan West, banjo player Aaron P. Burnie, Kieran Poile on fiddle and Jerome Belanger behind the double bass. They get the ball rolling in fine fettle with a nod to the region’s boom and bust history on the fiddle-led jog Fool’s Gold, the unlikely prospect of a strike balanced against being stuck in a collapsed economy. The tempo’s taken up a few notches with the frisky Snowflakes In The Sun, a musing on loss (“The city’s frozen solid and the exhaust hangs in the air/Just hovering like a ghost of yesterday/Like the snow upon the concrete, so deep beneath my feet/Seems her memory is moving in to stay”) with banjo solo break before being reined back in on The Old 98. The latter borrows the melody of Wade Hemsworth’s Log Drivers Waltz, in an ode to their ‘home away from home’ bar at the 98 Hotel in Whitehorse that again speaks of economic depression (“it’s a lowdown, it’s broke down/A reminder of what used to be life in this town”).
Waitin’ on a Pay Cheque has more of a lazing old-time feel, a saloon piano backed song with a tale about tapping someone up for a few bucks that everyone can relate to. While, despite title expectations, Everybody Dance is actually a forlorn fiddle wistful ballad (co-written by McCallen and his then clearly precocious two-year-old-daughter) about asking for a second chance (“Just count to ten/We can start all over, try to do it again”). As implied, Since The Farm Got Sold returns to economic collapse (“I couldn’t catch a break and I couldn’t catch the rain/The crops all died, the well went dry, and that’s when the banker came/He said sometimes it’s just the way it goes”) with a fiddle-flowing tune that can’t help but recall Folsom Prison Blues.
Changing narrative focus, slow, strummed six-minute penultimate number Wish draws on Canadian history, sung in the voice of a soldier freezing in the trenches in what I assume from mentions of Queenstown and Blackrock in Upper Canada, is set to a backdrop of the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans who were looking to invade Canada. It finally ends with another knees-up on Drunken Goodnight, a number they describe as being about letting your friends make their own relationship mistakes in the hope they’ll eventually figure things out (“You might say it ain’t my place, who’s to say?/Between the both of us I’d guess you’re probably right/I don’t understand, why you hang around with him/but you know you got the right”). The latter again sees Poile in the solo spotlight while banjo and mandolin provide the foundations. A promising debut you should have the good fortune to discover.
https://www.theluckyonesmusic.com/
Photo Credit: Mark Kelly Photography