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Whether this is or not the first last call in his 54-year-long recording career since he first formed Matthews Southern Comfort, only time will tell. But if it – and presumably at least one sequel – does bring down the curtain, Iain Matthews is going on the high note he’s consistently maintained, again featuring long-time collaborator and producer B.J. Baartmans on guitars alongside drummer Sjoerd Van Bommel and Mike Roelofs and Freddy Holmon on assorted keyboards. As you might imagine, there’s a strong reflective thread woven through the songs, opening with one of several Buma Stemra co-writes, the bluesy, organ-backed walking rhythm Ripples In A Stream, where he starts by recalling “When I was young and foolish/How I fought the urge to run/There was a pearl in every oyster/And I answered to no one/When I was young and headstrong/No good to man nor beast/I railed against my instincts/At the cost of inner peace” before finding direction in making music.
Music’s also at the heart of the piano-tinkling, whimsical fingerpicked The Bird And The Fish, inspired by Richard Powers novel The Time Of Our Singing and its theme of music as a unifier of ostensibly different parties, captured in asking the metaphorical question “If the bird and the fish could fall in love/Where will they build their nest”, answering “They’ll build a nest if that’s the plan/The way it’s been since time began/The only way that’s known to man/With love, love, love”.
In contrast, daughter Luca Mae on backing vocals, love has gone into hiding on the marching beat, fingerpicked bluesy folk Where Is The Love, a commentary on the state of the world (“There’s a news alert on CNN/As another hopeless war begins… This world’s become a battleground”) with love “nowhere to be found” and homelessness an epidemic (“Tonight, it’s only you and me/We sip our wine and watch TV/Soon to be consumed by sleep/While thousands sleep out in the streets”). It’s not just the line “what’s that sound” that conjures thoughts of Buffalo Springfield.
Luca hangs around too for the Nilsson-esque funky groove of She’s A Digital Girl, clearly a good sport as her dad sings how, even if not actually about her, she’s “Gone with a faraway look in her eyes/In her Woodstock tee-shirt three times her size…adrift on an ocean of digital haze/Content in her haven/of samples and grooves” and there’s many a parent who’ll identify with the lines “She says ‘leave me alone dad, you won’t understand’/As she swats at the door with a phone in her hand”. But hey, she’s alright.
More laid-back in a mid-70s haze, unlike the bird and the fish bedding down together, Good Intentions is a straightforward chalk-and-cheese relationship break-up (“in the end it’s fair to say/That good intentions fade away… you and I were sure to fail”) that sports the wry line “you’re no warmer than a soup spoon”.
As it suggests, the six-minute fingerpicked troubadour folk title track (a bit Harry Chapin, a bit Gordon Lightfoot) has him musing on getting older and when it’s time to hang up the metaphorical boots (“I know deep down it’s a slow decline/Sometimes you’ve got to adjust your load/And remind yourself it’s a hazardous road”) with underlying allusions to a creative block (“I feel the music move in me/I just need a way to set it free… I’m standing in the spotlight doing my thing/But I just can’t get these birds to sing”) and the fear that “It’ll fade one day and it won’t come back”. When it reaches the closing verses (“I’ve left my mark it’s fair to say/From the starter’s gun to the close of play/I’ve lived the life, withstood the pain/When I’ve overindulged or I’ve abstained…When all is done and dusted/From the moment of my birth/I’ve spun my long interminable songs around this earth,” it’s hard to think of it as his own My Way.
Next year sees Matthews out on tour with his old Plainsong partner Andy Roberts and, a co-write, the piano-backed gospel-tinged I Walk picks up the same thread (“I walk to find the music that stirs inside of me/Flowing from an unknown place of creativity… I walk to feel the music/To shake the music free/From the rhythm/of the gravel on the path beneath my feet/These old Adidas beating time/With every syllable and rhyme/Until the song’s completely mine”), extending it to life itself (“I walk to find the answers to who I think I am/To find out where my place is in Gods universal plan/The distance between right and wrong/Lights that flicker off and on/As if by walking I can see/That clear & bright epiphany”).
Returning to uncertain times as well as late 60s West Coast influences, New Dark Ages, with its chiming acoustic guitar chords, piano and brushed cymbals, balances “we’re skating through uncertain times/Deeper thoughts and darker crimes” with reassuring lines for his daughter (“my precious jewel, my shining star/Oh my little one, you’ve come so far/I hope you know how much I truly care… And I’ll be with you through the new dark ages”).
Co-written with Freddy Holm and featuring Iain’s wife Marly on backing, Rhythm And Blues opens with a nod to Down To The River To Pray, except the waters here are those that flow through the history of R&B, “from Mozambique to Senegal” to the voices on the street as he traces its lineage and influence from “way back before the blues were hip/When Bessie Smith was letting rip”. It journeys then through “Harlem 1952/East St Louis toodle-oo/The Duke and Billy Strayhorn too… When Nat King Cole was in his prime/And Charlie Parker’s doing time” to when “Something changed in ‘62/With Miles and Monk and Malcolm too” and through to James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane, the Motown explosion when “Detroit city came alive/Said fuck that white boy rhythm and jive” and up to the likes of Biggie Smalls, the instrumental breaks paying homage alongside the lyrics.
Returning to matters of the heart, the drums clattering, It’s Complicated observes the tangled nature of its emotions: “Love is just a random shot/But give it all the love you’ve got/Take some time and think it over…Don’t complicate it, you’ll rue the day/You stood your ground, but you overplayed it/Just trust your heart”. By way of a shift, driven by hollow percussion, banjo, and a swaying mountain music feel, Santa Fe Line is a storysong about Smokestack Jack (the name a reference to the steam engine extension that helped lift the smoke) from New Mexico, whose grandfather was an engine driver, and he, like his father, abandoning big city dreams to raise a family and work the graveyard shift, raising his sons who eventually followed the tracks he had never ridden.
It ends with, first, the chugging, guitar-twanging Turn And Run and a powerful return to social commentary about how racism (“I may not be a white skinned Yankee doodle of a man/But I deserve compassion and respect for who I am”) and the treatment of those who aided America in Iraq and Afghanistan and were then abandoned stoke the fires of terrorism (“It only takes a madman with conviction and a gun”). It has a specific reference to the fallout from those wars (“I took you to that secret place/Where Saddam came undone/I took things to the limit/Then I watched you turn and run… Did you think you’d simply blow us all to kingdom come”) but has a resonance for today’s entire Middle East situation (“My heart is full of sorrow for a home I can’t defend/A future for my children’s something/I can’t comprehend/My homeland is in turmoil as our struggle rages on/But the tides are swiftly turning as I watch you turn and run”).
It would initially seem to end on an upbeat note with the piano-accompanied To Baby with the opening lines “You gave me all the love/that’s necessary/When two people try to find themselves/Love beyond all common sense… suddenly you came along/To help me share my perfect song, in perfect ways/The closer that we drew together/Made our love seem like forever, naturally”, but a discordant note turns it upside down as an empty nest lament, “the thing that I most feared/In a changing world, baby, I saw you disappear/Empty now and silently/You face your struggle to be free/To be on your own,/To grow so very carefully and suffer necessarily for what I’ve done… To baby, who wants to know her thing/In a changing world, to baby who’s learning how to sing”). Such shadows aside, this is nevertheless another immersive and engaging album from someone who has proven himself a consummate craftsman time and time again, far more than just the ripple in the stream he modestly calls himself. The album may prove a swansong, but, as he says in the opening number, “I still got so much left to say/Cause it’s in my body, it’s in my blood… I hope I know when I’ve had enough”, but “until such times I’ll strut my stuff”. Long may he continue to strut.
How Much Is Enough (volume one) (7th October 2024) Sunset Blvd Records (US)/Must Have Music (EU)
