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Devarrow says his mission is “to make music that feels really good”; with Heart Shaped Rock, I’d say the mission is accomplished.
Better known under his moniker Devarrow, Heart Shaped Rock is Canadian singer-songwriter Graham Ereaux’s fourth album. It is an introspective musical journey that explores themes of love, loss, self-discovery, and social consciousness across a diversity of styles.
Counted in, it opens the whistling, jaunty loping beat of Lightning Bolt, written one winter while living in his converted school bus and trying to keep warm, taking a JJ Cale rhythm and giving it a faster, poppier feel as he sings about how trying to get things done while life’s distractions (“There’s five to thoughts too many in my head now… And everyone is asking me where I’m going/But I don’t even know where I’ve been”) just won’t let you.
The equally catchy pop of Likewise offsets that infectious melody with lyrics about relationship angst (“Likewise is the same thing/As saying goodbye again when we’ve tried again/And I go walking when my heart is talking/And telling me to put down the phone
And go outside to clear my mind and pass the time/But all I ever think about is you my sweetest love”) and the wry line “I don’t want to die all alone in an infirmary/I’d rather die at home with you right here beside me”.
Riding a slowly bubbling keyboard line, laid-back vocals and more whistling, the title track, with its lazy 70s summery vibes, reflects the album concept from which the name derives of searching for beautiful things in plain sight and learning to find happiness in the basics (“Love going out looking for those heart shaped rocks/Take my time and I go real slow… let’s work it out/And maybe we will and maybe we won’t”).
Cowbells lead into the sunnily upbeat strummed Together Again (“sun comes up and seasons change/Another one is here just all again/Everyone is laughing and everyone is here/Were better together together again”) that, for some reason, had me thinking of a hybrid of Ray Davies and Jonathan Richman. That’s followed by the brief, echoingly sung Holy Ghost, recorded live at a DIY demo session in 2018 with new vocals added, with its defiant lyrics (“All my friends are getting old/All my friends are letting go/I want to live/I want to give/I want all of my friends just to see/I want to dance/With you”). In contrast to the euphoria there, Pictures is a slow-paced piano ballad ode to grief written in response to and memory of someone from his immediate friend group who died in a plane crash and what her loss would mean to them all.
Staying with piano, here matched with driving drums, Half Of You has a bluesier feel, the lyrics just adlibbed without having any strict sense (She’s coming, coming, coming, coming home/Taking it out like I said you would the night before/Head underwater go right out to walk out that door/How did ever get so hard and get so pure”). Another written on his bus during winter, Bus Baby, emerged from a long-standing joke between him and his partner that he was cheating on her with the bus and stood as a metaphor for finding happiness and clarity in the mundane.
Falling Into Pieces has more abstract adlibbed stream-of-consciousness lyrics (“Every time I try to paint a picture/Losing sleep on a bed of coals again/Waking to the most peculiar sunrise/The smell of coffee grinding in my head… People down in Boston love their lobster/Send it west where the money is best they say”) to match the melody that emerged from just doodling on his guitar.
Featuring birdsong and with hints of early Paul Simon, Help Me is more focused, a social commentary about environmental and social collapse (“Have you ever wondered how it would be/If the ground never rose up to meet your feet/Have you ever wondered how it would end/If you never saw love or that river bend”) and a desire to find meaning in life through strong community bonds and a relationship with the environment (“I have a dream that someday I will plant an orchard/So I can feed my friends when all of the grocery stores are empty/And I have a dream that someday I will have a pasture/So I can find meaning when the world is deceiving us again”).
“They say all good things change and all good things go”, he sings on All The Little Things, a number he described as an obituary to his twenties (“Yesterday I buried my twenties in the yard/Had a little funeral behind my car/We’re gathered here today to say a few words/Fuck being young and fuck getting hurt”), a period marked by anxiety, depression, and a deep sense of insecurity, and an open arms welcoming to his thirties and the growth that came with them (“Every day I wake up and check my phone/The world is still spinning and I’m not alone”).
Staying on a sober note, Talking Shit plays as a direct protest to a culture he sees as damaging to the community, drawing on Bell Hooks’ book All About Love and the idea that we’ll all be better off and kinder to one another if, instead of “talking and gossiping”, we can learn to speak honestly and openly with everyone around us, noting “I’d rather an honest community with conflict and resolve than a dishonest one with resentment and polarisation”, or as the lyrics put it “judgment is just another word for being insecure/But happiness won’t come to those by others being hurt”.
He ends with the cathartic Come Again, a throwing off of being enslaved to social media screens (“If I don’t post has it still happened/Well sure as hell those bombs are blasting/Regardless of the hand that captures”) and about working towards a life of meaning and joy, a reminder that “regardless of what is going on around you, regardless of whether your friends know about it or not, we each have the power in our own little way to bring good to the world”; it’s surely a cousin to Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’ in its sentiments. He said his mission statement is “to make music that feels really good”; with Heart Shaped Rock, I’d say the mission is accomplished.
Heart Shaped Rock (4th October 2024) Paper Bag Records
Bandcamp: https://devarrow.bandcamp.com/album/heart-shaped-rock
