Gregory Alan Isakov
Appaloosa Bones
Dualtone Records/Suitcase Town Music
18 August 2023
Those familiar with Gregory Alan Isakov’s seven previous albums will know that the Colorado-based singer-songwriter’s early work favoured spacious, cinematic soundscapes, creating textured moods rather than energy, and, with contributions from Leif Vollebekk, Danny Black and Aoife O’Donovan, it’s this to which he returns on Appaloosa Bones, his first release in five years.
The tracks generally hover around the three-minute mark but feel like majestic opuses. The album opens with the classical piano notes intro to the slow walking rhythm The Fall before the piston hiss percussion, a banjo riff and his falsetto vocals (and a spoken part) expand the sound with images of fragility (“Ivory bone opera glass“) and, apparently inspired by the risks of a trapeze artist falling during his act, a lyric about resilience (“We all break a little, when we fall/And evеrybody keeps saying, ‘Get up, get up'”).
The banjo also sets the scene to Before The Sun, a less lush and slightly more uptempo number with double-tracked vocals that, a road song of sorts (“Fifty-five mile signs…Sand city bus/Kicking up dust”), again speaks to self-reliance (“I’ll go it on my own“).
The wearily sung, slow, spare and shimmeringly lovely title track steers a similar thematic path, the phrase coming from a rodeo world saying about being tough enough on the inside to get back into the saddle after taking a fall, though here, touching on mental health issues, that strength comes from the help of another (“It’s like you say all the time/The world has lost its mind/Between you and I, I know/That I’ve lost mine…Was I that gone?/Man, I hope not/I’m glad you found me/When you did”) as the piano lifts it to a soaring peak and fade.
The thread is picked up on the suitably tinkling, carousel swaying, folksy shades of Silver Bell, which, opening with gambling imagery (“Silver rain makes green every once in a while”), is about emotional rescue and the support of a lover when the chips are down (“I been lost, lost at every crossing, I was just drifting cold/Couldn’t tell ya how many times I was ready to fold… my gal, she’s a silver bell, she pulls straight from the loam/Just a kiss from your lips and I’m ready to go“).
Isakov also runs a small-scale organic market gardening farm in Colorado, where he produces vegetables, seeds and flowers. On Watchman, he extends the metaphor of a farmer needing to stay up nights to keep an eye out for coyotes preying on sheep to the protection of a lover in a predatory world (“Always dressed up and never picked up/Watch every headlight cruising past our door …So take me however I seem to be, haunted I know/Our love got lost out there/Arm in arm, we’ll light our torches/And search the fields behind the houses“).
As you might surmise, the sparsely strummed, piano-tinged Miles To Go, with its echoey resonator guitar break, is a musician’s road song (“Hotel bar/Sinking in/Broken heart/Busted strings/Lamplight eyes/Telephone wires/Darkened sky/We’re almost home“) where “Highway signs, cut the clay/You find yourself miles away“. Hollow footsteps lead into the piano notes of the orchestral sweep Terlingua. It may be titled for the Texas ghost town but is basically a love song wrapped up in pastoral nature imagery (“Fox runs with the lightning/Worked its way into an open field/Come midnight, we’ll all be dreaming/It’s the owl who owns the evening…Desert flowers wait for rain/Scattered seeds along the plains/Storms will swell, the days will fly/I’ll love you like the passing time“).
The piano-led, slow walking and similarly subdued orchestrally arranged Mistakes is a song of regret drenched in metaphor (“I caught a golden wave/It left me lost at sea/I turned crazy Wild and awake/The ocean was angry/Foaming at the mouth“), and snared in the undertow of consequences (“Sun breaks, but you’re finding only shadow“). That ocean imagery spills over into One Day, the deceptively light waltzing tempo and campfire mood providing the framework for an apocalyptic and increasingly prescient climate change lyric (“One day the waves will forget the ocean/And wander their way up to the shore…One day the fire will givе up its ashes/And weave thеir way through the open air/One day the rain will cover us up…One day the stars will stop flickering off/On and off and on and off/On and off and on again“).
The penultimate and longest track on Appaloosa Bones, at just under five minutes, the fuzzy, slow clumping, echoey piano-led Sweet Heat Lightning was once known as Cicada Song (hence the line “Sweet heat lightning falls/Blue crack of light and that’s all/Calling you to sing“) and has a mix of childhood memory (“Monsters beneath your bed/What’s real, what’s in your head“), a resignation of passing years (“My mother’s house is empty“) and an unknown future (“You drive, let’s see where this ends/Let’s let the wheels wear out“). Things coming to a close with Feed Your Horses, opening with an eerie desert night drone before keys and guitar conjure an almost Waitsian late-night bar mood on an achingly gorgeous song of enduring love in the face of a restless heart (“You say love’s a speeding train you gotta catch/You been searching the subways for the perfect match… Your crooked heart has left you to roam/Looking for love, you forget to come home/I’ll wait for you, darling, like grain in the ground/I’ll feed your horses, oh, I’ll feed your horsеs/Yeah, and I’ll feed your horses when you go into town“).
Suffused with enigmatic poetic imagery to complement the simple but exquisite contemplative arrangements and spiritual feel, this is an album to absorb as you lay outside on a summer night gazing up at the stars.
UK and European Tour
November 21—Glasgow, UK—SWG3 Galvanizers Yard
November 22—Dublin, Ireland—National Stadium
November 23—Manchester, UK—Albert Hall
November 25—London, UK—Roundhouse
November 27—Winterhur, Switzerland—Salzhaus
November 29—Amsterdam, Netherlands—Paradiso
November 30—Eindhoven, Netherlands—Muziekgebouw
December 1—Groningen, Netherlands—De Oosterport
December 2—Antwerp, Belgium—De Roma
December 4—Cologne, Germany—Kantine
December 5—Hamburg, Germany—Uebel & Gefaehrilch
December 6—Berlin, Germany—Metropol
December 7—Copenhagen, Denmark—Pumpehuset
December 8—Oslo, Norway—Vulkan Arena
December 10—Stockholm, Sweden—Cirkus