Boo Hewerdine
Understudy
Reveal
2022
Written at his Glasgow home and recorded with Chris Pepper in East Anglia, Understudy, Boo Hewerdine’s tenth solo album, finds him in a reflective mood, largely informed by the pandemic years, musically akin to its predecessor’s 30s and 40s influences, the songs both full-band arrangements and stripped back guitar or piano settings. The latter’s the case for the opening Magnets, which, coloured by violin and Gustaf Ljunggren’s lapsteel, is a dreamy meditation on growing older that refuses to see ageing through a negative lens (“Age is just a number you’re beautiful inside/Today is the first day of the rest of your life”) and a resolution to look on the positive side, to “take my frown turn it upside down”, a celebration of love as magnets drawn to each other.
A similar theme informs the soft percussion, lap steel and undulating rhythm of Useful as, growing older and the universe colder, he sings, “I just want to be useful/I just need to be needed”, something with which, without any hint of self-pity, many of a certain age will identify as they still feel younger than their years (“in my head, there’s a city playing blind man’s bluff”) and still want to be taken out to the ball game.
That sense of somehow having passed the expiry date and losing your purpose returns for the full band arrangement of Men Without A War, a co-write with wife Audrey and Vlado Nosal, that, based around piano but featuring strings and rocky electric guitar, adopts the metaphor of soldiers without a war to fight for the way men redirect their frustrated testosterone (“We’ll go out on a Friday and set the world to rights/Standing in the shadows beneath the flashing lights/Feeling so much anger but who knows what it’s for”).
Circling piano notes providing the framework, Someone Else’s Blues has him empathising with others’ troubles, those who feel they’re treading water “as empty as the comedy that comes after the news” or that they’ve lost sight of who they are, but acknowledging it’s hard trying to dance in someone else’s shoes, the track rounded off with a trumpet, sax and clarinet coda.
Hewerdine lost his father during the pandemic, and the album is dedicated to his memory, while the piano ballad Why I Bring You Flowers, a co-write with Kim Richey and featuring Pete Harvey on cello, is about visiting him in the care home, finding words hard to come and remembering childhood days, the flowers a sort of unspoken conversation.
It hits the halfway mark with the McCartneyish The Thing You Love, which sort of reverses the cliché that you always hurt the one you love as he sings about not knowing what to do “when the thing you love is hurting you” and whether it’s best to just be friends, though, given the reference to Dr Feelgood, it could also be about addiction. One of the loveliest tracks is Dream Within A Dream, a gentle ballad with vocal harmonies from The Key Notes on a song that again touches on growing older, memories and reveries of youth.
Paring it back to acoustic guitar accompaniment with Ljunggren on flute, Ancestors continues the theme of passing years, of the legacies of past generations and what, in turn, we will leave behind us. It’s back then to piano for The Day I Fell in Love With The World. This retro-flavoured strings-laced song crystallises that feeling that everything is right with the world and your place within it when you notice things you’ve never seen or heard before and realise the beauty out there, of the friendships shared and of life “more blessing than cost”.
That hope continues to shine in Spring which duly shimmers and sparkles like the sun reflecting on water as nature’s rebirthing stirs the life within you, the song again drawing on images of a dream as you count your good fortune (“I wonder what it would be/If I had never found you/What would become of me”). The journey pulls into its penultimate stop at Euston Station; a piano-led co-write with his brother Ben, who plays keys, a memory of his first time there and how feeling lost in the crowd eventually gave way to feeling part of it with subsequent visits, the lyric a meditation on arrivals and departures (“Where did it go wrong?/When does it go right?”), before (in a hint at mortality) boarding the train, never to return as the pace gathers.
It ends with Afternoons, another gentle reflection on visiting his father (“We talk about our music/And how it felt on your first day at school/Where you met my mother/And how was like back in Liverpool”) before recalling he and his sister sorting through the boxes of a “life in paperwork” after his passing, making a joke to try and lighten the grief about “possessions that are free once more”.
Starting with The Bible back in 1986, in the 36 years since, under his own name, as part of State Of The Union and The Great Divide or in collaboration with Darden Smith, while consistently critically acclaimed, Hewerdine has released 18 albums with only one making the Top 100 (71 with The Bible’s Eureka), always, as per this album title, waiting in the wings for his moment in the spotlight. But, as he consistently proves, he’s second to no one.
Understudy is out now.
Order via Bandcamp: https://boohewerdineandthebible.bandcamp.com/album/understudy-2022