John Smith’s ‘The Living Kind’ is an understatedly emotional and introspectively melancholic celebration of hope and light in the face of despair and darkness…It’s a masterpiece.
The Living Kind was recorded live at Joe Henry’s home in Maine with Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, John Martyn’s Solid Air and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira as inspirational touchstones, John Smith’s follow-up to 2021’s breakthrough album The Fray is a reflection on three life-changing years in which his wife suffered a miscarriage, his mother was battling cancer (both of which fed into the previous album), his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the family moved to Spain. The songs came from the process of rebuilding their lives and are about changing for the better in the face of loss, facing the bad but celebrating the good and staying positive.
As such, it’s an often stripped-back affair, Smith on 1963 Martin and Mulecaster steel guitar, complemented by Jay Bellerose and Joshua Van Tassel on drums, Patrick Warren on keys, Henry’s multi-instrumentalist son Levon and jazz bassist Ross Gallagher. It opens with the rhythmic acoustic strum and jazzy caresses of Candle, a piercingly moving song inspired by his father’s affliction, the strings simulating the flickering light of a candle blowing in the wind and the way dementia shifts in and out of lucidity and the weight of being a caregiver as he quietly sings “It took me a while to see the change/Though it appeared as if from nowhere/I hadn’t a way to recognize it/Knew not of the cross we had to bear” and of how “There are days when I find it easy/And there are days I don’t find at all/When I reach for the hands that held me/And they’re waving at me as I fall/Wearing the burden like a saddle/The weight of the world and nothing more” as he wonders “Maybe it’s more than I can handle…and I’m burning out…like a candle”.
His now seven-year-old daughter is the subject of two songs. The first, Milestones, with its percussive backing, warm, fuzzy melody and Smiths salt and honey purr, touches on a familiar note of these moments you miss when you’re a travelling musician trying to balance family and career captured in the heartrending “I left behind my darling one/As she began to walk all on her own/I watched her first steps on a video/In some distant dressing room/I decided as the curtain went/It was either give up there and then/Or keep on going/I went out and did the best I could/Trade a milestone for a piece of wood”. The other, the five-minute Henry co-write Silver Mine, opening with a shimmering wash and smokily sung, casts her as “my diamond in a silver mine” and her hand his anchor “For a ship that sometimes disappears completely” and her voice the bell that guides him back to the light “When darkness closes in/I hear her calling/Lead me away by hand, by heart/From hope that comes apart/When I am falling”.
The title track, with its scratchy guitar intro, is a musically upbeat, jauntily strummed folk-rock romp with lolloping drums, swooping almost calypso organ frills and Smith’s joyous vocals and the call and response harmonies as he sings, “You know I’m the living kind/Thinking on mistakes I made/They’re sliding away, I’m watching them fade/Finally dreaming up a plan/Do you what you must and do what you can/I don’t feel like running out of time” evoking Van Morrison at his sunniest. That’s followed, in turn, by the more subdued strummed, tapped percussion acoustic Trick Of The Light, which explores tentatively emerging from the cloud of grief and self-doubt but also feeling guilt in doing so (“I went looking for the truth/Bitter & broken/Time has had its way/And I’ve finally woken/As if from a dream/But maybe it’s a trick of the light…And the love that I knew, so good and so real/Seems a lifetime away, I’ve forgotten the deal/Don’t wanna walk into the day”).
Levon Henry’s sax circling Smith’s guitar, the rhythmically tick-tocking Dividing Line appropriately starts the album’s second half with more Morrison warmth, a glow that contrasts with its picture of a relationship worn down by struggles and emotional distance (“Some days he don’t even make a sound”) as he cautions “Don’t do your loving with a cold heart”. Things are pared back for the simple, acoustic American folk dustings and gently brushed backing of Too Good To Be True, a tender reflective love song (“And when each dreaming day was through/We both knew what we had to do/You and me and baby, me and you/When life was too good to be true …Just lovers kind of learning as we go”).
It starts its final descent with the ruminative Horizons, the song with its piano, strings and guitar, the result of catching sight of the Catskills on a drive through freezing Albany, New York, and the metaphor that inspired (“Beauty on the horizon/Some days it’s hard to reach/And it carried on moving…Everything/Passing me, passing me by…It’s a quiet sensation/When revelation reaches deep/And you won’t hear when it’s calling/Unless you walk into the breach/So I carry on searching”).
A co-write with Iain Archer, pinned with bubbling bass, percussive knocks and chiming eBow treated guitar, The World Turns is a soulful love song about holding tight to your rock and anchor as the world carries on, finding “a new way to feel” and how “through the push and the pull/There’s a light at the centre/And I’ll keep coming back/Here beside you”.
It ends with another Henry co-write, the stripped-down acoustic, cabin-folk spiritual Lily, a Townes Van Zandt-haunted hymn to resilience and fortitude enfolded in the lines “Time the great deceiver/Says I ought to leave you/But I need you more than time can ever know…here I stand/Looking back where I came/Across the fields growing/Still and silent as my shame/For hope and all believing/I’ve given too much life redeeming every fear/It leads me where I go/But you walk out before me/A light inside the doorway now …In endings new beginnings/In each new day the chance to hold/My lily in the valley of the rose”, quietly ebbing away into a serene silence.
The Living Kind is an understatedly emotional and introspectively melancholic celebration of hope and the light in the face of despair and darkness, of finding that “new way to feel” and holding form to the things that matter. It’s a masterpiece.
JOHN SMITH PLAYS
APRIL 2024
3rd Beacon, BRISTOL
4th Union Chapel,LONDON
5th Stables, MILTON KEYNES
6th Arts Centre, COLCHESTER
10th Trades Club, HEBDEN BRIDGE
11th The Wardrobe, LEEDS
12th CCA, GLASGOW
13th The Caves, EDINBURGH
17th The Brook, SOUTHAMPTON
18th Phoenix, EXETER
19th Storeys Field, CAMBRIDGE
20th Storyhouse, CHESTER
24th Upper Chapel, SHEFFIELD
25th Glasshouse 2, GATESHEAD
26th Brewery Arts, KENDAL
27th Arts Centre,WARWICK
Tickets for the tour are available from http://johnsmithjohnsmith.com