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Massachusetts duo Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards return with Making Promises, their fourth studio album, once more steeped in their close harmony folksy Americana with several stripped-back acoustic songs inspired by their marriage in 2021. Appropriately, it opens on a romantic note with the circling fingerpicked When Love Comes ‘Round Again (“it doesn’t ask to be let in, need permission, or forgiveness or fair warning to begin”), leading to the local progression of the mandolin-flecked duetted Make A Home (“a shingle of our own, a stove to warm our bodies by and a land to reap and sow/a flame to light the darkness, a candle burning dim, a dance with every breath you’re breathin’ in”).
Raianne on lead, accompanied by mandolin and guitar, Another Day Tomorrow is about asking, “Have you tried the best you can”, learning from the past (“what is life if not a lesson/what is time if not a gift”), looking to the future, moving on from setbacks and resolving “to be a better man”. Doubtless inspired by wedding vows, Mark steps back up for the mid-tempo Making Promises, asking what they mean and why we make them (“they make liars out of those/not strong enough to find/a means to remember/a reason from the heart/a testament we finish everything we start/to see through to the end and claim no great reward/the prize is in the going never doubt whatever for”), Raianne joining on for the final stretch.
Conjuring the air of the hot summer evening and fireflies he sings about in the first line, One Who Don’t repeats the title line for each verse as is, as the line says, about those who “don’t see the forest from trees”, a song about the need for empathy and understating in the way we approach others and the world around us. One of two numbers recorded at earlier sessions and another that uses the forest/trees image, the slow waltzing, woodwind-coloured Only A Matter Of Time with Doug Williamson on piano is, as the title suggests, about things that come around and change, for better or worse (“heads you come clean, get on with things, tails, there’s nowhere to hide…what goes up must come down and ember gets free from the flame”) and how “there’s always a price to be paid, a balance between loss and gain”.
A bluegrass-style ballad with appropriate instrumentation, Reflecting is about the struggle to know what’s right when times get hard, “spending hours wrestling with which side is a dream and which is life” and having to “hold on to the feeling like a dim lighthouse light” when the darkness threatens to engulf you and knowing which way you end up facing having been spun around.
Hello Bill has a very specific backdrop, being a memory of and tribute to one “Shakey” Bill Rabitor, a pedal steel player and frequenter of the Blackstone Valley Music School where Mark teaches, his nickname coming from the effects of his medication, who would recount stories from his youth (“when I pick up the banjo/I remember each time you’d recall the tale/while in the navy you learned to play guitar”), who donated his 60’s Stratocaster “for the kids to play a knock off Neil Young”, spending his last days in a veterans home, cassette tape of him rehearsing being played at the funeral.
The last of the original material, taking its title from the Eugene O’Neill play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a beguilingly lovely clarinet-shaded simple folksy fingerpicked lullaby of sorts musing on mortality but not giving up (“after all these trials/just to say we’ve had enough/seems like a fear of tryin’/when the goin’ gets tough”), it sets the scene for the closing track, the other earlier recording, with Raianne on vocals and clarinet, accompanied by Williamson’s piano and Peter Hart on pedal steel, for a rendition of Auld Lang Syne that has the musical equivalence of the peaty taste of a vintage Laphroaig. Unfussy, with no unnecessary frills, this is immaculately constructed and seamlessly played organic contemporary yet timeless folk music that comes from and speaks to the heart. The legendary music critic Robert Christgau once said, “In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better”. Theirs is a promise they will not break.
Out on 9th May 2024 on Nobody’s Favourite Records
