If you don’t want to read through three to four hundred words, I’ll tell you upfront. This is a great album and, if there was any justice in the world, Matt Patershuk would be making songs instead of bridges for a living. “Same As I Ever Have Been” is a masterclass in creating memorable songs from a variety of starting points. It can be as mundane as the end of a labouring life and the onset of arthritis in “Hot Knuckle Blues” or as fanciful as the downfall and humanisation of a Titan in “Atlas”. Either way, Matt creates songs that are lodged in the memory long after the last chords have reverberated into the distance.
The variety of lyrical topics is matched by the variety of musical stylings across the album, following the raw guitar and sax urban blues of “Cheap Guitar” straight into the Nashville, pedal-steel-laced title track which has more than a hint of Jim Reeves. It’s quite a contrast, but it works in the context of the album.
There’s a current of melancholy running through the album, starting with the opener “Some Times You’ve Got to Do Bad Things to Do Good” (herd of deer and faithful old dog are dispatched) to the mournful closer “Swans”, telling the story of a family of swans torn apart by a musket ball. The realism of the narration steers well clear of “Old Shep”-style mawkishness while still hefting a powerful emotional punch.
But the piece de resistance, creatively and emotionally, comes in the middle of the album with “Memory and the First Law of Thermodynamics”, a slow waltz commemorating the life of his sister Clare, who was the victim of a hit and run driver. It’s a potent combination of metaphysical lyrics (‘All of you floats about in the blue, you’re just less orderly’) and hearbreakingly emotive pedal steel and trilling mandolin. It captures perfectly the grief we’ll all feel at some time and the strategies we use to weaken its hold.
The album is packed full of melancholy references, but still manages to end with a symbolic message of hope, as the swans set off on their journey to a warmer place. Matt Patershuk explores some of the classic American songwriting themes with little twists reality, irony and pure poetry and creates an album that’s honest, inspired and cathartic.
“Same As I Ever Have Been” is out now on Black Hen Music (BHCD0085).