Eliza Gilkyson
Home
Realiza Records
23 June 2023
Eliza Gilkyson‘s ‘Home‘ is an album born of reflections during the pandemic. Throughout, she is accompanied by Don Richmond on assorted guitars, bass, hammered dulcimer and mandolin, musing on home as a safe place, a refuge, as well as the importance of friends and family.
Anchored by simply plucked banjo and coloured by mandolin and pedal steel, she opens with the Southern hymnal-sounding True North, the title emblemising the compass point we carry within us, our guiding light in uncertain times when “It’s hard to know who’s friend or foe/Or what lies round the bend/We’re torn asunder, tossed to and fro/To where all roads must end”, here the love that is a constant rock in her life (“‘Cause when I look into your eyes/My compass still runs true/And I only know that my future lies/On the road I’ll walk with you”).
Written at the start of the pandemic, inspired by images of people opening their windows and singing and cheering in support of health workers, the softly propulsive World Keeps On Singing, with Nina Gerber on 12 string and electric, pretty much speaks for itself (“There will be no adulation/No monetary reward/Just your hands and the hearts of your loved ones/Tryin’ hard to make a better world/So keep your foot on the pedal/Keep your eye on the prize/When you get to the end you can bet that it’ll/Feel so good just to be alive”).
The first of the album’s collaborations, How Deep, is a fingerpicked love ballad duet with Robert Earl Keen about looking at our lives as we face mortality and asking such questions as “Did I do everything/I promised myself I’d try to do/Did I follow my heart/Finish what I started/Pay attention to the music coming through/Did I listen to the sound of the rain coming down/And most of all how deep did I love”.
Commissioned by Grammy Award-winning choirmaster Craig Hella Johnson to write a song for his Conspirare Choir, another with a folk hymnal quality and loosely modelled on the chord progression of the First Movement to Beethoven’s Quartets in A min, Sunflowers is a gently strummed number in solidarity with Ukraine, imagining a Ukrainian mother’s wish for a return to the simple pleasures of life (“All we ever wanted was roses round the gate/Small-talk cross the fences/Fire in the grate/All we ever wanted was our children to be born/Laughter in the schoolyards/Shelter from the storm/The promise of tomorrow/In the new light of the dawn/And sunflowers”).
Fittingly, it’s followed by Safety Zone, though, in fact, a loping bluesy, gospel-inflected number with Ray Bonneville on harmonica; it was written following a near-fatal accident in which her car rolled forward as she was getting out, dragging her down a dirt road and into a tree. The track emerged as an empowerment and inner strength in standing up against the injustice in the world and the immorality of the Right (“Well I never believed in evil/Never believed in the heavenly light/Til I saw first hand what’s been done by man…Well the poor man lives for tomorrow/Tryin’ to run from his troublin’ mind/And the rich man lives off the poor man’s sorrow/Stands on his back to get one more dime…/But when the deal goes down you gotta fight”).
One of two tracks that push past the six-minute mark is the slow and soulful Witness, previously featured on More Than A Song, her 2002 collaboration with Iain Matthews and Ad Vanderveen, but carrying shades of The Band and with vocals by Lubbock’s Rod Taylor, this is its first appearance on her own album, brother Tony Gilkyson on electric guitar, a song that, as the title says, bears witness to a loved one (“The way you pull the veil/From the man behind the curtain/Cry from the heart for the lonely ones/The way you hear me out/when you know I’m hurting/You’re the compassionate one”).
Her brother also lends his guitar twang to the scurrying country shuffling rhythms of Here Comes The Night, a number fuelled by both the pandemic and social and political unrest that takes comfort in knowing that, while humankind may fall victim to the apocalypse (“The sea and tides will all rush in/The stars will be shaking as the buildings fall/Nothing will be left standing here at all”), the Earth will survive and be reborn.
The second six-minute track, Man In The Bottle, is a slow waltz, folk-blues tribute to her late singer-songwriter father, Terry; the song not only incorporates snippets of his songs into a story about a woman looking back on her life with her father but, Rod Taylor channelling his voice, also featuring contributions from musicians who’d played with him, John Egenes on Weissenborn for Solitary Singer and Van Dyke Parks playing piano and accordion on The Girl With The Sad Eyes (on which he featured in 1965) with The Rifters taking the role of her father’s band, The Easy Riders, on Blue Mountain.
The second of the ‘name’ vocal duets come from Mary Chapin Carpenter on the acoustic, piano-accompanied Sparrow, another older, hitherto unrecorded song, an appreciation of the relationship between artist and the fans that give the music its life (“My song’s a sparrow singing, searching for her nest/You bring her to her rest/When you/take me in your heart”).
The album ends on the Karla Bonoff title track, Home, a stripped-down, prairie-country-sounding number, with trilling mandolin and pedal steel, about the troubadour’s longing to leave the road behind for “home and its warming fire”.
Across many albums, Eliza Gilkyson has consistently proven herself one of the finest voices and writers in contemporary American folk music; Home is the icing on the cake.