Julian Taylor – Beyond The Reservoir

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Beyond The Reservoir, the latest offering from Julian Taylor is titled for a place called the St. Clair Reservoir, where he used to hang out as a teenager in Toronto. It follows up his 2020 breakthrough album The Ridge, featuring many of the same musicians, including pedal steel player Burke Carroll, Miranda Mulholland on fiddle and Derek Downham on mandolin, ukulele and banjo. The album charts a move into adolescence and adulthood with themes of identity (he’s of Mohawk and West Indian heritage), loss, sadness, resilience, hope and redemption, drawing on the four elements as they relate to humanity.

It opens with the seven-minute gentle sway and strum of Moonlight, a reflection of a turning point in his life (“At the corner of Avenue Rd and Eglinton/There was delicatessen on northwest side of the street/I met my aunt there on my 21st birthday to grab something to eat/That was a moment that changed just about everything”) where  “she handed me a silver ring with an ordinary stone/One that I had picked up on the beach nearly twenty years ago”, sparking transition from his restless youth  (“Moonlight shone at the break of dawn beyond the Reservoir/And I was handcuffed to the backseat of a policeman’s car/I was arrested a few times but the real crime is all the friends that I buried”) and the realisation that “The sadness and the sorrow, and every tomorrow …the pain and the suffering, the hope of recovering makes us who we are”.

There’s a darker tone to the softly, intimately smokily sung, fingerpicked Murder 13, which is set in 2005, talks of dealing drugs in school, relates to and is sung in the voice of one such buried friend, initially coming over as a nostalgic reverie (“Do you remember Kay’s party? first year the blue jays won/how could you forget that Joe Carter game-winning home run?”) before the narrator asks a friend to make a drop, (“Think about it” s’all you said/That’s when our paths uncrossed”), ending in the chilling final line as he remarks “My name is Alex… I was murder thirteen”.

There’s a bittersweet note to the gently chugging It Hurts (Everyone Was There), a memory of going to or playing local gigs (“They’d come for the music and to see old friends/Maybe even meet someone new/In another lifetime, that’s what we used to do”) counterbalanced with regret in the line “don’t it feel like we lost touch… Did we lose touch?”

Counted in, riding a steady drum beat and pedal steel colours, the folksy, melodically infectious Wide Awake brings to mind those early James Taylor comparisons as he speaks of his parents (“My father was born in the islands, my mother was born on the great turtle’s back/They prayed for me when I’d go out in the evening/At least that’s one of the rumours I’d hear… They did their best and they did it for freedom/They did everything they ever could for me”) and recollections (“the greatest pictures are never taken/They’re all stored in your memory”) of childhood (“We went to Church every single Sunday. We’d get dressed up and then go to Granny’s…. place/I’d run around that house with my cousins.  We loved to race”), as he seeks to reconcile now and then (“Right now, while I’m trying to be present, I’m still chasing shadows of my past”). There’s a jubilance as he sings, “And now… I’m wide awake, I chalk it up to all of my mistakes, and all the heartache that I’ve had to face and all the choices that I’ve had to make in my life”.

He sings about “an abundance of hope that lies within the oceans of time”, and that finds expression in the strings-flavoured Seeds, a poignant song inspired by the discovery of an unmarked mass grave of 215 indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021, finding something positive in tragedy (“They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds”) and that ”Somehow Everything Eventually Dreams Someday”.

Their story is revisited in the image of “the bodies of children in unmarked hidden tombs”, another lengthy track, featuring slide and hand drums, Stolen Lands again as he addresses the country’s history of colonisation and slavery (“One family had their land stolen/The other was stolen from their land and here I stand”), recalling another close to home tragedy (“I know a black woman who sits at her desk chair/Sometimes she cries sitting there because fear became her worst nightmare/She cries because her only son was killed by a shotgun/Another senseless tragedy triggered by police brutality”) and cultural disenfranchisement (“I knew an old man who’d sit in his armchair/Sometimes at night I’d catch him crying sitting there/He cried because when he was a kid, he spoke his language and then lost his voice and part of his own lineage”). The chorus brilliantly evokes Guthrie to turn his words back on themselves as he sings, “This land is your land and this land is my land/This land was made for you and me/A poor choice of words by Woody Guthrie/This land was taken and now everyone sees”.

The lyrically metaphorical I Am A Tree echoes the underpinning theme of Seeds, drawing on nature to bring a calmness and air of quiet pride and assurance in the simple statement, “I am a tree/I was planted to be free/I’ve grown to simply be/Cause I am a tree”  in addressing heritage (“Children climb all over me/I pass on all the knowledge I know”) and endurance in the face of tribulations (“I weather the storm around me/Many have tried to cut me down…Every time someone touches me, I’ll live forever in their memory”).

Arranged for piano and strings with the lyrics referencing Hendrix, Stephen Stills, Catcher In The Rye and even Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, a book of Buddhist enlightenment and following goodness rather than aggression, Moving is a simple, dreamily melancholic soulful song of that inevitable moment (“There’s nothing strange about it/It’s just the illusion of time and without it we’d be standing still”) when you have to let go (“Crates of 45’s would soon be carried out the door”)  leave the past behind (“The flame wasn’t completely out but the truth was without a doubt …In my head I see it all, pictures of your family on the wall. There was a time when I was there as well/The paint in the living room was beige/We fought about the colour change for days”)  and embark on the next step in your journey.

It ends with the rhythmically shuffling, upbeat, building euphoric Opening The Sky, the title a literal translation of his grandfather’s Mohawk name (Tahoronhianent) and written as  Desiderata-like words of advice and encouragement to his daughter (the words “light bright snow” are a translation of her name) that she can overcome any obstacles: “Mind your manners, always say please but don’t bow down to nobody/Bloom where you’re planted and don’t take anything for granted/Good things don’t come easy/Don’t expect that they do/The wind will guide you… Ask lots of questions and without any question never doubt yourself…In a world that may not see you for all that you are, never forget you have so much power”.

An album steeped in deeply personal growing pains that touch on universal feelings, veined with sadness and joy, anguish and hope, touching on the confessional spirit and resonant emotions of a Springsteen or Browne, it confirms Taylor as one of the finest voices in contemporary Canadian folk music.

Beyond the Reservoir is out now: https://linktr.ee/juliantaylormusic