Sean Taylor – The Beat Goes On
Sean Taylor Songs (STCD116) – Out Now
The Beat Goes On is Sean Taylor‘s second album of the year, following Lockdown’s Linton Kwesi Johnson-esque political invective against corrupt government and organisations and a call to defend the rights of minorities. Here, the London-based singer-songwriter returns with a more musically and lyrically subdued cocktail of blues, roots, soul, jazz and Americana. Again recorded in London and remotely in Austin with producer Mark Hallman variously contributing bass, organ, drums and pedal steel and several tracks burnished by the haunting Celtic soul soprano sax notes of Irish jazzman Michael Buckley, who previously featured on Taylor’s Walk With Me album, it opens with the smokily sung keyboard-based minimalism of It’s Always Love, the title pretty much encapsulating the basic idea that having a soulmate by your side helps to weather the storm.
Written at the height of the pandemic and featuring cellist Brain Standefer, the equally whispery delivered dusted Americana blues Lament For The Dead unfolds to circling acoustic Spanish guitar notes as he sings of “last words, desperate tears, and final goodbyes” and of “one last kiss one final hug”. Buckley returns for the laid back Brubeckian, and Van Morrison tinged jazzed rhythms of the piano, organ and bass arranged title track, a song, like many that surfaced during the pandemic, celebrating the power of music to keep the emotions positively charged (“Turn it up on the good days/Rock out on the bad days”). A similar theme extends to the following scuffed shuffling Better Times where “lovers and artists stand tall/In the hope of better times”. The soothing five-minute classical styled piano interlude Nocturne bridges a tonal shift into the itchy laid back bluesy groove of Nowhere To Hide, the last of Buckley’s contributions, its downbeat lyrics (“It’s creeping through the walls/It’s cutting through the halls/Take your life away”) again written in response to the pandemic.
The only lyric not penned by Taylor is Be My Love In The Rain, a setting of the Robert Frost poem A Line-Storm Song with the title taken from one of the lines, Taylor tapping out percussion on the guitar. At the same time, piano, bass and drums embellish the airy, Irish colours of the melody line. The upbeat mood is marinated for the rest of the album, leading off with the jogging countrified guitar frills and pedal steel of Let Kindness Be Your Guide, the lyric calling to “cherish friends and loved one” and how “small things fill up our hearts with hope”, with being in the arms of the one you love worth more than “bigger cars and bigger house”.
Another bluesy walking groove comes in the form of Back On The Road, basically a love letter to his live audiences and getting back to playing for them again (“come on dance, sing and give everything you’ve got”). Pedal steel and circling acoustic notes resurface for the shuffling penultimate Stay With Me, a mention of Camden Town and another celebration of love and freedom in “the wild of the night”.
It ends with the six-minute The Heart Of The Ocean, a reflective cosmic Celtic ballad love song to the sea and the ties and tides that bind us to one another that, over the course of its fifteen years gestation, has transformed from a guitar number into a piano epic that opens with the sound of waves, shimmering cymbals and filigree piano notes and builds to a soaring widescreen finale where “sea and sky are one/In the heart of the ocean”.
In the wake of the experience of the past two years, ‘The Beat Goes On’ is clearly an album Sean Taylor needed to make, and, as we emerge back into some sort of light, it is very much one we need to hear.
The Beat Goes On is out now and available here.
For details of Sean’s upcoming European 2022 Tour and his Facebook Live Gig on 11 December, visit: https://www.seantaylorsongs.com/gigs