Looking on from our real world, our jobs and our computer screens, there is something alluring about a life like the one Michael Hurley lived. He was an outsider’s outsider, an essentially itinerant worker whose work was mining the raw product of his unique mind and presenting it as entertainment. And he was good at it. He seemed to pluck songs from the air like a Victorian urchin stealing apples.
Hurley died in April this year, at the age of 83, the day after playing his final show. Broken Homes and Gardens is his last studio album. If he had plans to slow down or to tie up any creative loose ends, there is no evidence of that in these songs. They show Hurley in his essential form: digressive, surreal, jokey, ultimately moving. A folk prankster with a poet’s soul. These recordings are perhaps slightly less scratchy, more fully realised, than what we have come to expect from Hurley in recent years. This could be due to the presence of an unusually wide array of collaborators. Luke Ydstie on bass and drummer Rachel Blumberg are the mainstays, but there are also, at various points, saxophones, a pump organ, clarinet, marimba, xylophone and banjo.
The songs are a broad mixture: re-recordings of old favourites, a sprinkling of covers and a handful of new pieces. It opens with the dusty and atmospheric blues of Junebug, which is given a slinky undertone by Lewi Longmire’s guitar. It sounds assuredly rough, which is what you want from a Michael Hurley song. It’s DIY done right. Junebug, along with one or two other songs here, had been kicking around in live sets for quite a while, but the focus of a full band gives it a new and irresistible energy.
That energy defines the album. From the Marvin & Johnny cover Cherry Pie (full of the youthful exuberance Hurley never lost) to the stomping, sax-laced rerecording of Indian Chiefs & Hula Girls, the whole thing rings with a boundless generosity of spirit. The Abominable Snowman, something of a fan favourite, gets a deliciously icy reworking, while the new version of The Monkey is discursive and lightly jazzy.
He even finds time to throw in some welcome curveballs, particularly the weird and wonderful This, where a wordless and wandering vocal spins out alongside delicate guitar, marimba, bass clarinet and a droning pump organ. It’s the freakiest his freak-folk tendencies have been since his days collaborating with the Holy Modal Rounders.
The easy humour of his songwriting and the rustic theatricality of his delivery remained undiminished to the end, and it’s evident here in the joyous Fava, where he improvises a homespun shopping list: ‘Do me a favor/You get a lotta ricotta, Kalamata, ciabatta, hide your salsa, frittata/How ’bout a banana for mañana?’ On New Orleans ‘61, he gleefully channels the old bluesmen, usurping the cliches of the genre and coming up with a richly detailed tale of life on the road. It’s a story – a kind of creation myth – you suspect is at least partly true.
He was also capable of sweet, tender moments: closer, In a Dress, is a soft-spoken paean to uncomplicated love featuring a Hurley’s convincing vocal impersonation of a trumpet solo, while the travellers’ folk of I’ll Walk With You, which rejoices in time spent in good company on the road, now reads like a kind of leave-taking. It all adds up to the perfect reinforcement of something we maybe already knew: Michael Hurley was a treasure. Every one of his songs is a twinkling eye or a dusty pair of boots. Broken Homes and Gardens is a fitting way to cap a thirty-odd album legacy that is as important as practically any songwriter you care to mention. He sounds like he had a whole lot more up his sleeve. He always did.
Broken Homes and Gardens (September 12th, 2025) No Quarter
Bandcamp: https://michaelhurley.bandcamp.com/album/broken-homes-and-gardens