Published on May 17, 1999
The more I get into this job, the more artists I get a chance to
hear. And the more I hear, the more I’m getting convinced that
another revival of folk music is just around the corner (even if it
wouldn’t be a commercially feasible idea, I’d be all for it).
Artists like David Wilcox and James Keelaghan have all shown me
that good folk music is alive, well and being practiced all
around.
Now comes another artist who is carrying that torch – in more
ways than one, judging by the album cover. Guy Forsyth’s latest
disc
Can You Live Without is a surprisingly fresh approach to an
old, classic sound to folk that is a wonderful thing to
experience.
Just the sound of the album’s opening track “Calico Girl” lets
you know that whatever preconceived notion you had about this album
is probably wrong. With the help of band members like percussionist
“Mambo” John Treanor, bassist The Mighty Gil “T” and drummer Chris
Searles just to name a few, Forsyth creates a mood that has one
foot firmly planted in the roots of this music and the other in
1999.
With tracks like “New Monkey King,” “If I Was Sick” and the
title track, Forsyth starts to break Antone’s out of the mold of
being strictly a blues label and moves them into new territories.
And while Forsyth’s music can’t be simply labeled as blues (or
labeled at all, for that matter), there is a splash of the blues
incorporated into his music that ties all the different styles
together into one neat package.
The centerpiece of the album is “Heart Of Sawdust,” a tale about
losing grasp of one’s past and the innocence of youth, and trying
to look at an adult world through the eyes of a past childhood just
one more time. It’s a moving track, and one that reminds me a lot
of the work of artists like Wilcox due to its touching, gentle
beauty.
If
Can You Live Without is guilty of anything, it’s guilty of
not having more moments like “Heart Of Sawdust” on it. It’s not
that tracks such as “Don’t You Mind People Grinnin’ In Your Face”
or “Children Of Jack” are bad; it’s just that they don’t have as
much staying power as “Heart Of Sawdust”. If there were more tracks
in this vein, I truly believe this would have been an unstoppable
album.
Still, the 12 tracks on
Can You Live Without are a pleasant enough way to spend the
better part of an hour, and Forsyth impresses me as a musician and
artist who has a very bright future ahead of him. It will be
interesting to see if he takes the lessons of this album to heart;
if he does, something tells me I’ll be proclaiming his next album
as the best of that year.