Taking the title to musical heart (the album cover pointedly having him sporting different looks), after two albums mining country, reunited with producer David Mansfield who contributes, among other things, guitars, pedal steel, lap steel, celesta and Ondes martenot, alongside drummer Charley Drayton, bassist Tony Scherr and keyboard player Andy Burton, Teddy Thompson’s latest album, Never Be The Same, digs back into rockier seams for his first album of original material since 2020 and, with influences ranging from Crowded House and The Beatles to his father Richard Thompson, songs exploring love, change and the passage of time.
With John Grant on synthesizers, there are, though, still country ballad traces to album opener Come Back with its major chords and his soaring vocals keening across a can’t live with you can’t live without you lyric streaked with regret at screwing up a relationship (“I said I hoped you were becoming someone else/I didn’t mean it to suggest/That who you are right now is not enough for me”).
The drums make their first forcible impression on the riffing drive of I Need Real (Love), which, conjuring a heavy Everlys, carries on down the same thematic path, here looking for deep connection as opposed to superficial feelings (“I’m asking now for intimacy, love and the wow/Hey universe I’m ready now go ahead and disperse”), the lyrics capitalising LOVE to make the point, while, with cascading piano notes, the poppy Beatles meet Orbison Remember harks back to schooldays angst and wise parental words that set him on his path.
Slowing it down to a barroom bluesy waltz with tenor sax, trombone and trumpet, and Thompson opening up his falsetto, the title of So This Is Heartache pretty much tells its own ‘girl I let go story,’ the music bathed in Stax waters while the lyric strikes a quintessentially old school British note as he sings “I was the bounder/Had it my own way”.
Chiming guitars and drums kick things back up on the steady walking rhythm of Worst Two Weeks of My Life, described as a “dry kiss-off to unnamed vices” and serves up the witty now I’m sober line “When you come and see me/It’ll have to be for green tea”.
McCartney influences permeating, Baby It’s You returns to the ‘can we get back together now I’m of a clearer mind’ thread before Richard Thompson puts in an appearance for the twangsome guitar riff to the jaunty 60s pop colours of Make Up Your Mind with its themes of emotional repression, commitment phobia and procrastination and the curiously Scottish phrasing of “cannae make up my mind”.
Echoing the classic retro country jukebox sounds of the early My Darling Clementine albums, The Game might not share any musical affinity, but the “it’s all in the game” can’t help but evoke Tommy Edwards’ 1958 hit about how many a tear has to fall, or in this case, wedding bells never chiming.
It heads to a close with the amps turned up and a big build intro to the mid-tempo kiss-off Not What I Need that bizarrely starts with him singing “I’m sorry, I should’ve told you weeks” before jerkily backtracking to “months ago” as he concludes “I’d like to say we’ll still be friends/But who would I be kidding” and that “it’s hope that really does you in”.
It ends with jittery keyboards, echo on vocals, and mentions of Brooklyn, LA, and Paris, with Same Old Song, which, while the album generally talks of how change is not only inevitable but essential, is lyrically actually more of a “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” persuasion.
The album title may speak of flux, but Thompson’s brilliance remains predictably constant throughout.
Never Be The Same (May 15th, 2026) Royal Potato Records