“These may be songs of restless hearts, but they beat with the blood of a master craftsman.” — Mike Davies

https://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/reviews/JohnJenkins7/

After diving into autobiographical waters on previous album, Tuebrook, Liverpool-born Jenkins has taken a more storytelling approach this time around and, while personal experience may inform some of the characters, these all involve fictional personas populating songs that revolve around themes of restlessness, stifled dreams and searching for the stars.

With an acoustic emphasis, he's joined by Scott Poley on dobro and pedal steel, pianist Chris Howard, Phil Chisnall on resonator guitar), Pippa Murdie on mandolin and cello, Jon Lawton playing guitars and bass and Mikey Kenney on fiddle, he and Poley trading scorching solos on album opener, 'Cruel Wind', a chugging train time about feeling you're going under and regrets about a failed relationship ("She took her sadness with her/But I still feel it all the time/Once the guardian of her secrets/I wish that I had treated her more kind").

Leaving also underpins the sparse desert country strummed, piano traced, intimately sung 'The Disappearance' in which, after one fight too many, "she left her bags in the motel room/Told her husband she'll be back soon/Till 6 o'clock he did wait", her not returning leaving him "not knowing if she was pushed or did she jump…so many reasons for her to go/Did she leave him and will he ever know".

The mood doesn't lift with 'Too Many Roads', an old West styled mandolin-driven mid-tempo ballad about a meeting between a character who's lost their way ("I should have seen it coming but I looked the other way/Too many roads for me to choose/I scarcely recognised myself caught between two moves") and the stranger lending an ear to his story ("I looked into the valley intending to go home/But there was a sadness in him I could not pull away").

Several of the songs involve religious imagery, case in point being 'Colorado In The Spring', another lost soul story ("Alice had lost touch with her own feelings/Once she'd had never let them go") as she finds herself in church looking or the light and answers ("I knelt before that shining light/Prayed to God with hands grasped tight/I do believe I was right/As a child she thought she'd seen an Angel/When her mother passed away/Time can play tricks on old folks' memories"), the track leaving an air of Southern Gothic mystery has to the backstory.

Disillusion and resigned disappointment are next on the checklist with the dobro, fiddle and fingerpicked acoustic Tex Mex flavoured 'I Didn't Really Want To Change The World' ("Y'know, I didn't really want to change the world/Maybe next time"), followed by the slower paced, steel and piano tinkling 'Sound Of Thunder' with its cinematic narrative of an empty life ("Fed the cat - she ignored me/She sits on the windowsill, can't remember a time she ever sat on my knee/Daddy looked frail, never stopped looking old/And I wish he'd stop working, it's taken its toll/Guess old habits never die, but one day he will") and an uncaring world ("There's something indifferent about the falling rain/Put my head up to face the sky, hoping to rinse away the pain"), the lines "I looked in the mirror, feeling tired that night/Felt the fear of loneliness and its silence and its bite/This house is like a peg on which hopes are hung/Is it just one more thing to overcome?" feeling like a casting call for Sissy Spacek.

By now it should be clear this isn't an album to go to to lift your spirits, the despondency continuing with, another song with a priest, the melancholic fingerpicked emigrant ballad 'Brooklyn' ("I was torn but I was hopeful/Thought my dreams would comfort me/it's so easy to be mistaken/When you're far away in a land across the sea") with mournful fiddle and Murdie on harmonies as, another song with a fatalistic view ("I guess some things were just meant to be") he sings "The mirror I thought was my friend/Wish I could remember when my youth did end/And Ma and Pa they've both gone/Never got to see my wife and son".

Seeking escape but finding only a road with no destination is the narrative thrust of the strummed rootsy folk 'The Not Knowing' ("Ben thought he could get away from himself by moving/Drove his car with his rough hands, fingers tobacco stained/It's such a long way to where he thinks he's going/Such a long, long way from where he thinks he's been…Ben feels exhausted by the task of trying to make sense of things/It's no use living in the ashes of a dead happiness"). There were times I was reminded of 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix'.

The classic lonesome broken-hearted drifter character puts in another appearance for 'Spent The Night In Austin' ("Bummed a lift/Should have known /Where I was taken/Never be like home/Those good old days have been lost in my youth…Man, I needed some beers/Made a friend with the jukebox/But even those happy songs brought me tears"), seeking comfort from the hurt wherever he can find it ("Thought about Maria/And the heartaches and grief…

I never took her for a thief/She left my heart in disbelief…she wanted just to dance/Looked at her with an odd tenderness/That she took for romance…Walked the streets to clear my thoughts/I made a friend with a girl on the street/Young enough to be my daughter…I guess there's a time and a place for everything I swear and I don't want to go there".

It's small fruit perhaps, but the penultimate 'Never Needed Much' does come with a lighter touch in a song basically about being content with what you have ("He never changed his shirt/Said it looked really good/Kept his old Chevrolet/You'd see him underneath that hood/From the crack of dawn to the end of the night/And never needed much/To feel he had made the most of his life").

It doesn't last, though, 'The Man Who Breaks Your Heart' one more downbeat song about a relationship that might be going down for the third time, ' ("I should have thought before I said those words/I'm just a fool and I know you hate me/And I guess it's all that I deserve…I make mistakes, there's no denying/And I promise to be better I swear…Can we roll back the time and make a brand-new start…it's not that I've been untruthful, or I've been lying/ I don't want to be the man who breaks your heart").

After all the gloom, it ends, hints of McTell, with the light shining through the traditional-flavoured folksy fingerpicked 'Farthings Wood' ("As I walked out this morning/The wind no more than gently breathed/A calmness had hung over me/As I made my way into the trees/I saw a girl walk towards me/When she spoke, I felt she had gazed into my heart/Something stirred inside of me/And I knew from her I'd never wish to part") as it weaves together memories and mortality in its final verse ("I dreamt my wife walked beside me/To Farthings Wood where our love did grow/And I dreamt I was an old man/So old I felt the anguish in my thoughts/Soon they'll bury me in Farthings Wood/With my young wife who I did love so").

Reflective, clothed in a weave of sadness, hurt but also stitched with joy and hope, these may be songs of restless hearts but they beat with the blood of a master craftsman.

Mike Davies