I heard a song via Apple Music earlier today. The lyrics told me to calm down, that everything will be okay. It was just what I needed to hear, soothing the fear and stoking some hope for the strange age we find ourselves stuck in. Why do we only know the good times when they’re gone? Why must we turn the page, close the book, and start over again? Can’t we go back to the way things were? We know the answers to those questions, of course, but it doesn’t stop us from pondering the nature of time, theoretical physics, and whether—as the Battlestar Galactica reboot teaches us—all of this has happened before and will happen again.
To that end, early this year, troubadour Podge Lane moved from his native Ireland to the American South, which he’s since used as a launching pad for jaunts across the country, with his travels—and 100 gigs over seven months—informing his songs.
The press release quotes him as saying, “This album is everything I’ve seen in these last few months of traveling reflected back showing a different version of what I thought I was gonna see, like a carnival mirror. Some things were prettier than I had hoped, some more painful than I expected. Ironically it’s the most open I’ve been about my own struggles, because I stopped thinking about myself. I just wrote songs to tell stories. Unabashedly, I put the song first and the kick drum 45th. Through it I answered my own questions, and saw the person I am, or the people I could become. Hopefully, if you need it you can find some answers in these songs.”
Unlike the fine-tuned productions of his past studio albums, Less of Me is a rough-and-ready affair that’s accented by false starts and sparse arrangements. It’s akin to eavesdropping on the goings-on at Columbia Records Studio A—though the songs weren’t recorded there but at makeshift studios in NYC during a summer heatwave. It conjures the folky singer-songwriters of yore, with an acoustic guitar and/or piano underpinning the melodies and a reedy harmonica complementing Lane’s oft-high lonesome vocals. Echoes of Neil Young, John Prine, and others—Glen Hansard, especially—reverberate.
The album opens with “Kicking Up Dust,” about life on the road, and goes from there, while a harmonica wheeze blows open the homesick-tinged “Broken Door.” “Honesty” digs into truth-telling and avoidance in potic fashion. A gorgeous piano motif leads into “The Story,” a fantasy that could well be subtitled “Podge Lane’s Dream.” As I noted upon its release as a single, the metaphor-laced “Heatwave” sports the feel of a ramshackle Neil Young side circa the early 1970s. “January 2nd,” meanwhile, muses about new beginnings and modern blues.
The harmonica-tinged “Oh, To Be Alive” shuffles along, with Lane’s lyrics singed by sarcasm and cynicism. “Let Me Ask You” reminds me—in the best of ways—of the Swell Season, with Rebecca Dermody’s harmonies a wonder to behold. The album closes with “Kerosene Lighters and Fireflies,” a delicate tune that channels the age-old proverb “home is where the heart is”: “The further I roam from the place I call home/the more I find out it was here all along.”
The Old Grey Cat 