Folk for the new generation
You can only take your hat off to someone for whom recording an album is a labour of love. Too many times you listen to records and the sound is one of a band who are, metaphorically at least – and who knows in this technological age perhaps literally – phoning it in.
It is a real pleasure to come across an artist who is happy to take chances. Now, “taking chances” is one of those glib phrases that people say in an album review, and it doesn’t necessarily mean making something deliberately challenging, shouting and swearing at an audience, or even radically changing your sound. Sometimes it can mean challenging yourself, taking yourself out of your comfort zone, doing something different.
That’s what Idaho’s Korby Lenker did. For “Thousand Springs” he decided the last thing he needed was the confines of a recording studio and instead decided to get out and see the United States. Recording the tracks in more than a dozen locales, including the edge of the Snake River Canyon, a cabin north of Sun Valley and his undertaker father’s mortuary.
So when you hear the opener, the gentle and fragile “Northern Lights” and hear the opening line “the night sky’s a chandelier” it is tempting to picture the thought that it really was.
Lenker is a gifted songwriter – an award-winning author too – and he weaves his stories perfectly here. The harmonies in the superb “Friend And A Friend” are beautifully done (there is a cast of thousands helping Lenker make this record too), and the thought here that “this is the life I’ve chosen” perhaps exemplifies the suggestion that for Lenker is more an artist than a musician. He lives these songs.
“Nothing Really Matters” with its bluegrass flavouring is a gorgeous love song, and even when it rocks – as it does on “Last Man Standing” a track about Chief Sitting Bull – it does so in the crossover way that The Cadillac Three might do.
Unashamedly pop tinged, the album is very much the work of a man who wants to be inclusive and wants to be universal. To that end, “Book Nerd” is part Fountains Of Wayne, revelling in its quirkiness, while “Uh Oh” recalls Ben And Jason, but nothing here is forced or false. This is Lenker doing his thing.
“Stormy Seas” unearths a soulful side, but does so over some really interesting rhythms, and when it gets funky on “Father To The Man” it does so with clever lyrics that have just a hint of the Hold Steady about them.
“Late Bloomers” is as laid back as it gets, as if proving that good things come to those who wait, while the piano of “Love Is The Only Song” could almost be the overriding theme here.
This is mostly gentle, but “Mermaids” is especially dreamy, while the whole album, perhaps has been building up to the conclusion that the gorgeous “Wherever You Are” provides. Recorded in one take it is about the death of a family member, but it also provides a metaphor for the whole record given that it was made in such a transient way.
“Thousand Springs” is folk music made in the great tradition of the travelling troubadour, from Woody Guthrie to Steve Earle and beyond, travel is in the make up. It is just that this updates the concept for the 21st century. Away from music and writing, Korby Lenker is involved in an online movement called “Make America Friends Again”. These songs amount to a big welcoming smile and a warm safe haven for everyone.
Rating 8/10
