73
Dispensing with his trademark banjo at the suggestion of producer Afie Jurvanen and, by extension, his Appalachian-rooted sound, Nova Scotia’s Old Man Luedecke’s latest, She Told Me Where To Go, finds him exploring different musical textures on songs that capture the darkness and light of reaching your mid-life years, a point where he’d considered giving up music and had taken a job as a deckhand on a scallop boat.
The change is evident in the opening title track, a country blues with a steady drum beat and bottleneck guitar about following fate (“I do not hurry/And I do not rush/I don’t waste no effort/On what don’t mean much/She told me where to go …so I look for Chaos/And I look for signs”). A lighter acoustic shuffle, Guy Fieri is a playful folksy pop number about making music as a job that’s neatly summed up in two lines, “Do less bad work but get paid more/Is what everyone is going for/You get so close you lose all hope” and “To thine own self be kind/Someone holds you in their mind”, and basically saying “fuck it with the booze and smoke/Roll the window down/Smell the day lingering in the pine”. The title has nothing to do with the celebrity chef other than Luedecke remembering, “I stopped by a restaurant where Guy Fieri ate a burger once”.
A gentle loping rhythm with warped guitar notes, Going On The Mountain is another about cleansing the soul, casting off the chains and finding peace (“I can see it now that push has come to shove/Nothing here is certain in this world below/I will arise now and go/I’m knowing, there’s coolness there where I can finally stop/This restlessness of looking for the top/And the endlessness of knowing what I’m not”), with its hints of Van Morrison, while written for his children and drawing on an expression his grandmother used, The Quiet Good Goes On is again about opening up to the moment (“Once we saw a humpback whale breaching on demand/We stood on shore and leapt for joy we did not understand”) as it notes, “There’s so much wonder in the world that we can employ/To draw in on a deeper breath with things that annoy” and that, per the title, that magic is always there as we make our way through life (“All the things that bring you down, prove that you’re a fighter/All the things you leave behind will not make you lighter”).
Taking a funkier turn, the itchy rhythm of The Raven And The Dove has a Jonathan Richman feel to it in what’s basically a mix of self-admonishment (“I just said some foolish things that went and made you cry”) and grumble (“People on the internet say dumb shit/Almost all my anger is directed at it/Just a place of judgement and a dream of getting fit/My very worst addiction is being stuck on it”), throwing in a Covid reference (“Every couple months you know I’m angry at big pharma/I got in line to get the jab up in the arm/They used to call it art but now they call it trauma”) and another of love’s jumble of contradictions and mood swings (“Every couple is different but they’re trying to be the same/One day you are truly happy the next you feel insane”), that seems to be embodied in the title reference “the beauty of the raven is that he is not the dove”.
It hits the midpoint with the scuffed, loping blues-gospel shuffle and slide guitar of Shine On Love (“Now the congregation rises and their hands start swaying/Shine on love/When you hear her singing well then everyone is praying”), nodding to the church music of North Preston with Reeny Smith calling out hallelujah as the kindergarten teacher in the backing vocals amid the fathers and the mothers in the pews in the church of the Sanctified Brothers. Under his nom de music name Bahamas, Jurvanen shares vocals on My Status Is The Baddest, a playful whinge about parenthood (“At four o’clock we got lessons at the pool/No one wants to go cuz no one is a fool/Yet as a parent you got to try/Can’t say why you don’t know why/Don’t say the children are the hope for us all/It’s not our call, it’s not our call”).
The shortest at under two minutes, The Dreadful Wind and Rain borrows its title – and late 60s country vibe – from The Grateful Dead, Luedecke describing it as a song about the end of travelling and the end of a couple’s fight, the “sunny morning when the big clouds are breaking up and moving off”, or as the lyrics have it, “Just called back to say I love you, even after all that we’ve been through/After all the dreadful wind and rain, nice to see the sun again” when everything, literally in the lyrics, is apples again.
There’s another reflection about getting grumpy with age in Misfits In Old Clothes (“Forgive my anger, all my frustration/My lack of patience, things that I say/Round pegs in square holes/Dreams that have grown old and stand in the way/I’ve been uneasy all of these reasons”) and the frustrations of youthful ambitions unfulfilled (“When I was younger, I had a hunger/I had passion for growth and change/I changed myself but I couldn’t change others”) and increasing cynicism abroad in the world (“Wondering why truth’s nothing today/Furious motions of my emotions/Ignorant notions ruin the day”) as he wonders about shutting down (“There must be a button that can make nothing/Of all the loving in my brain”).
With its opening 70s R&B guitar flourishes, the guiding piano and mellotron and gospel backing vocals, Red Eye is a laid back, slope-shouldered number about the ups and downs of making music (“Played a cafe here in town/But word didn’t get around/I flew in feeling like a king/But I’m back on earth again”), life on the road (“In on the red eye out on the night”) because that’s what you do (“Ghost dog living for the beats and rhymes… don’t need to be at the top/What I’ve learned is I can’t stop/I face the fear that I will fail/Swallow the dragon by his tail”) and “What ain’t broke you cannot fix”.
Twangy resonator guitar and washes of electric blues permeate the folksy swaying Our Moment In The Sage about the uncertain fate of a summer romance (“The season here is ending love and I must go away/I have spent and I have saved and I have earned my pay/Come say that I may join you love in your city in the south”), the album ending with the soulful Into The Mystic feel of Holy Rain, actually, the first song written for the album, which, Glenn Patscha on organ, is a romantic vision of chucking it all in and going off to write your sad hosannas on an island unconcerned as to whether the work’s a success or failure (“Somewhere across the sea there’s a little cafe table and an ocean breeze/I will sit there writing all that I believe/I hope someday you’ll come along and sit with me”) and even though “I do not take rejection like I used to do/The wheel keeps grinding up the things that are no longer new/Doesn’t mean that I don’t have my work to do”.
After a six-year hiatus, Old Man Luedecke is back where he belongs, re-energised and reinvented with one of his finest albums to date. At one point, he sings, “if you feel me put your hands up in the air”. It’s a tidal wave.
She Told Me Where To Go is out Friday, May 24, on Outside Music.
