Ian David’s Green‘s Songs to the Dust is the Liverpudlian’s third in his Songs trilogy after Of The Sea and From The Wheel; as the title might suggest this has an underlying theme of mortality, joined throughout by multi-instrumentalist Marty Hailey, fiddle player Rachel Petyt, accordionist Phil Alexander and Su-a Lee on cello and hand-saw, as well as various brash embellishments.
It opens with the ruminative fingerpicked title track, a musing on the passing years and finding your path (“Cut through the years like we have some place to go/Oh can we carry more than all that we have lost…When we were young and the summers bled to one/Every road led to an ocean in the sun/Every smile was like a breeze upon the sea/Every door would take us where we want to be…Well no-one told us that the map is ours to draw”), with Peyt’s fiddle solo bridge.
Again fingerpicked with a circling musical box melody and faint piano, the self-described Cohenesque Love Comfort Me is about being lost, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and in need of rescue (“I cannot speak of right or wrong/I sought the light, the light was gone/I found the words but I lost the song/Love, oh love, comfort me”), suddenly bursting into a la la la chorus mid-way and again for the climax.
With piano trills and circular guitar pattern, Kostya Got A Gun strikes a timely note, set in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine as told through the eyes of a child talking about, presumably, his brother (“Kostya got a gun/Oh he doesn’t show it to just anyone/And I know the war will soon be won…And soon he says my turn will come/Then I won’t hide from anyone”).
At eight minutes, the waltzing strum Rosaline is the longest track, evoking thoughts of Peter Sarstedt as, peppering it with images of water, he spins out the story of a love that begins “Under the towers of glass by the old river markets…As fate slipped its magnetic coins into our pockets/I was won by the dress that you stole from the sea” and journeys through “the grand old hotel, chased by the horses/The taste of the grain in your mouth was like gold from the mountains/Dancing my fingers on the strings of the heroes” as “I made you my queen, you made me the king of your questions/And we turned off the TV and pulled in the curtains…Binding our threads on a thousand white beds/Where we summoned the sun and melted and drowned on the cotton”.
But, as the refrain suggests (“Don’t turn out the light/Don’t let me fade out of your sight”), it’s ultimately doomed (“I sailed like a blind man into the doldrums/Out of supplies, no chart, no sense of direction/Now I scrub from my bones the path to your home/And I try not to read from the lines of the miserable martyr/Still I dream every night of a letter I write/And hold in the air like a priest placing bread on the altar”).
Again played out on a strummed guitar with a similar musical and vocal echo, he turns to a true tragedy for Leiby Kletzky, an eight-year-old Hasidic Jewish boy who, in 2011, was kidnapped as he walked home from his school day camp in the neighbourhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, and subsequently, with no apparent motive, murdered and his body dismembered.
Banjo sets the scene for The Last Long Dance of Bonnie and Clyde, which has nothing to do with the legendary outlaws but plays as a song of lonely souls looking for connection (“He was locked in a mirrored box with a/Sketchbook full of frozen clocks and a/Backpack full of broken rocks by his side… She was wrapped in a wire gown with a/Map that took her to some other town and a/Hotel where the doors go round and around”) as he sings, “what more does a heart ever want but a way to be found?” Unfortunately, happy endings are not on the cards (“He put his hands on the hotel wall and he/Started climbing with no care at all how he/Had nothing that would break his fall but a dream… She heard a tap on the window pane and she/Felt the fog wrap inside her brain as she/Peeked out as the driving rain swirled around/In the lobby stood a frightened crowd in a/Different building in a different town they were/Freaked out by a sudden thud on the ground”).
Returning to the process of grieving that informed the first in the trilogy; the delicately picked The Boatman conjures the image of Charon, ferryman of the dead, here conveying his passengers to the other side of a dead relationship (“Watching every not to be tomorrow/Some other you, some other me/Some other path we did not see or follow…if there ever comes a time/The river that you face is far too wide/Oh come and find me by the waterline/And I will row you to the other side”).
The most musically upbeat number with its strummed busking guitar, mandolin, muted drum thumps and fiddle jig solo, Your Love Was Too Big For That Sky has a decided echo of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance as he sings about compassion (“Tending your lovers like/Trees in the forest/The shrine of your gentle affections”) and friendship (“Oh dance with me until the morning comes calling you/Out of the bones of the night”) and their power to overcome life’s overcast skies.
The penultimate Parachutes, with its free-falling melody, is another bittersweet number about a broken relationship and hiding the hurt (“I’m not calling/Your name/It’s just a flock of clouds/Some stratospheric whisper/Of rain/To the ground…I’m not screaming/Out loud/And this precipitation/It’s just a drop of atmosphere/That found/My eyes”), capturing the emotions in a lonesome harmonica break.
It ends with another story song, the upbeat, briskly strummed and handclaps percussion The Ballad of Frankie Mann, inspired by an Elvis tribute act that he saw in America and sung in the voice of the son of an Italian war bride who “touched down at JFK feeling 10-feet tall” with his guitar and “a jump-suit sewn with pearls” and wound up in Pueblo where he does his thing “most every afternoon/Between the entrance to the mall and the girl who sells snow cones”. But this is a celebration of following our dreams, whatever talent or lack of it you have, not a lament for them being crushed, as it ends, “So I am bound for Vegas, you’ll know when I’ve arrived/People point and people stare but I pay them no mind/‘Cause when the curtain finally falls at least I’ll know I tried”.
Green’s songwriting is as accomplished as his playing and reedy-voiced singing. Songs to the Dust is a magnificent conclusion to an outstanding and critically acclaimed trilogy, all of which deserve pride of place in your collection, and I, for one, can’t wait to hear what follows after the dust settles.
Pre-order via Bandcamp: https://iandavidgreen.bandcamp.com/album/songs-to-the-dust