Joana Serrat & Riders of the Canyon
Riders of the Canyon
Great Canyon Records
23 June 2023
While this may at first appear to be a Joana Serrat side project, she only sings lead on three of the ten tracks, the others being handled by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Matthew McDaid along with Serrat’s fellow Catalonians Roger Usart and Victor Partido, who comprise the band of the title.
It’s a Serrat number that gets the ball rolling with her uptempo swirling self-penned Master Of My Lonely Time (“I am trapped in my own frame/Master of my lonely time/Will you make us shine?”) with a rousing guitar solo by Joey McClellan. Her two other contributions are scattered across the running order, the next being the slow waltzing Riders Of The Canyon itself with its high lonesome intro, strummed acoustic and trumpet, a co-write with David Gimenez that, inspired by a wander through the wilderness, reminds that others that, emblemised by the riders, came before knew loss and heartache too. The third is the uptempo more country-pop Some Kinda Addiction, another collaboration with Gimenez along with McDaid, that sits in the ‘love is a drug’ category (“I’ve been too close to the well/I’ve been hanging over pain… there’s a crack in the wall/We’re part of some kinda addiction/Locked up in the chains of love”) on which they invent the adjective “Warmthy”.
However, while she may not be vocally upfront elsewhere, Serrat does provide guitar and two other co-writes. Everything Blooms In Spring is another collaboration with Gimenez, Serrat on delicate fingerpicking while Usart provides the mournful Cohenesque vocals (“It’s Spring everything blooms/Why am I not reborn within you?/In Spring everyone celebrates/But the Winter in me is what’s left”) and BJ Cole’s pedal steel colours between the lines. The other, sung by McDaid, is Dirty Water, 12-string guitar chiming Byrds echoes as the drums punch up the beat as McDaid’s lyrics strike an almost masochistic relationship note (“I’ve been drinking dirty water/From the river in your palm/and I, I’ve been kneeling on the sharp end/Another nail in the cross”).
Co-written with Gimenez, Partido is assigned the album’s first ballad with the strummed, softly loping melancholic Here In My Dreams, an Orbison-hinting reflection on lost love (“I found your last twisted letter from the far/Remained for years unopened at my dusty teenage desk/And it said “sure, we will never come back to this point that we dreamed about”/These days, the scene and the characters seem to blur/And the freezing lost illusions keep me caged and numb”). They also share credits for the rhythmically punchy, rockier driving Sunrising, a song about, while “It ́s so hard for me right now/To see the pictures of all of your stuff”, feeling ready to move on (“Take the steps I always wanted to take/Soon I will be able to breathe the air/Make the choice I wanted to make/And follow the sun”).
He’s also the sole writer on the jangling guitar-led, Dylan-shaded Downtown, the album’s most direct political number (“The filthy league’s already ahead/They’re freaking out like babies/Telling basement tales …I saw them coming downtown/I felt them suffering downtown/And I saw them bleeding”), complete with a blistering electric guitar outro.
This leaves McDaid to take writing ownership of the two remaining numbers, singing echoey lead on the harmonica wailing Cash country gospel chug of Wild River, another song that touches on addiction (“If this hope was mine to lean on/Darling morphine help my worried mind/Would she behave give me my fill/Keep me going down the gravel road/Hungry and tame along the hills/Till the morning I’ll be bathed in gold”), and handing vocal duties to Usart for the closing Sorrow Song, fingerpicking and piano slowly building to orchestral flourishes with a downbeat apocalyptic vision of how “ Ladies taunt but all they really want/Is to lay down with a beast/The love they chose to use and expose/Is the love they love the least” and the inexorable march of time and the loss it brings (“Children played and then ran away/Growing older in the fields/Will we ever remember them/Bring flowers to where they kneel”). Whether this continues as a collaborative project or simply serves as a launch pad for the band remains to be seen, but either way, this is well worth saddling up for.