Grant-Lee Phillips – All That You Can Dream

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Grant-Lee Phillips‘ “All That You Can Dream” was primarily written and recorded during the pandemic. While introspective and reflective, it has little of the musical angst and unease that’s characterised many albums recorded in the same circumstances. This is, in part, down to him using the time to be with his family, going out and exploring nature.

The album is built on a core of guitar and piano with Jennifer Condos and Jay Bellerose remotely contributing bass and drums, respectively, and keyboards, pedal steel and cello colouring various tracks courtesy of Jamie Edwards, Eric Heywood and Richard Dodd.

Much of the material finds him reacting to events that America went through over the year, while other songs chime with the themes being explored, such as the softly sung and strummed album opener A Sudden Place. Written in 2019 in response to the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral and explores how monuments believed to be unshakeable can fall prey to acts of nature or man (“The world’s a sudden place/It turns on a dime/And the night falls so suddenly”). As such, it provides a companion piece to the intimately sung Rats In A Barrel which delivers a condemnation of the Trump-inflamed (“Mama never raised a dunce/But some things still leave me Itching my head/How people who get up with the dawn/And toil away can still get conned/Believing what some liar has said”) insurrection at the Capitol Building in the so-called name of liberty while Abraham Lincoln looked on. (“Took my marching orders from that man up there/Hear them pleading how ‘I got caught up’”).

Another number born of the Trump administration is the slow walking piano-based hymnal-like ballad My Eyes Have Seen, which references the shameful treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers at the border (“On foil blankets strewn beneath the bridge/The sleepless and the desperate are hid/The mighty with our dogs and razor wire/A fence around the country where you live”), a reminder to those silently complicit that “all these prideful slogans are but cloth/Our hands are stained, the color’s coming off/The lies we tell ourselves devour us/Until we can’t remember what is lost”.

The eerie quiet of the pandemic is captured in the lazy, languid rhythm of the almost apocalyptic lyrics of Cruel Trick (“Shop windows are closed/Like a Sunday/And people are scarce/The power lines heavy with ivy/Sidewalks are quiet as nowhere”), Phillips showing a  rare note of anguish as he sings the title’s chorus refrain, and an epiphany about how “Funny time is so easily wasted/Funny I never caught this before”, and the need to get back to being with other people (“It took a holy mess to keep us apart/If there’s a cure for it/Stick out my arm”).

Cannot Touch The Ground again sounds a pandemic note, here homeschooling (“At the kitchen table/School begins/She’s got her face up on the screen/Can’t imagine how it feels to be thirteen”) and that fact that nothing is fixed in stone and everything can suddenly change (“I can’t believe what’s come to pass as normal…I’m running out of ways to pass the time”).

However, while the music may be relaxed, there’s still plenty of coiled tension in the lyrics, perhaps no more so than in Peace Is A Delicate Thing where, the title echoing the earlier transitory nature theme, he sings of “Wolves in the chamber/Rage in their eyes”, of “choirs of anger”, shattered windows, “the violence of lies” and how “we’re all walking a razor’s edge tonight”.

There’s a dark pessimism too, veining the ambiguously titled All That You Can Dream (the possibility of betterment or the inevitably of collapse) and its vision of a nation, a world, where “So few are free from want” and “New tongues are being spoken/New words for ancient crimes”. But he’s not without hope; that we’re not condemned forever to “this sorrowful dance” and “this whip on our backs” if we resist and “And refuse to lower your head/When the ones who abuse you/Push you down”.

There’s another ray of light in the saloon piano-based, lazing soft pedal steel, brushed drums shuffle of Remember This, a straightforward love song (“You will always have my heart”). Still, otherwise, the remaining numbers all look to the lessons learned or not from history. On Cut To The Ending, accompanied again by understated piano, he sings, “Now we’re left to pick up the pieces/Shovel up the shards/Because a fool won’t listen to reason/Till he’s gone too far” and of the “spineless enablers… who held the door/And knelt to kiss a ring/Held onto power/By any means”, as history repeats itself  (“I’ve seen some ugliness/Some terror in my days/I’d love to think we’ve seen the end/But when you think you’ve got the lid on, here it comes/The same old ghosts are back again”). That pessimism and thoughts of crushed hope also inform the slow walking drumbeat rhythm and deceptive dreaminess of You Can’t Hide, where he initially offers, “Let me lift you up and shoulder the weight”, only to follow with “Sadly, we were never taught/That the worst is when you come to believe” and “you can’t hide/Or turn away/From the world outside”.

It ends with another caution against complacency (“we seek to find some meaning in the past/But do not think, for once/That grief is buried in the grass“) and how evil flourishes when good men do nothing, with the rumbling background drums of All By Heart, as he sings “We become numb/We become hard/That’s human/We become cruel” as we “cover our eyes/When we refuse to see/What we know by heart… Every scar/Every lash delivered” and “become mute/Protecting ourselves from cruelty/Biting our tongues”.  

The soft and gentle musical arrangements may catch you off guard as, lyrically, this is very much the iron fist in the velvet glove and arguably some of the most potent songs he’s written.

All That You Can Dream is out now on Yep Roc.

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