This impressively bearded Canadian folk singer's third studio album is subtitled 'A Refugee Love Story' and was written for a musical play which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was subsequently staged off-Broadway for a successful 7 week run.
It is a bawdy collection of Eastern European influenced "songs, sounds and stories" which tell the "true story of Jewish Romanian refugees fleeing their homeland for Canada in 1908".
Although the focus is on a specific historical event the topicality of the work has a universal contemporary significance in the light of the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis surrounding immigration.
Caplan has stated that he wanted to write of people "finding equanimity within suffering" so there are more raunchy shanties than melancholy laments. Jaunty clarinet playing and the prominence of the accordion help create a 'Fiddler On The Roof' mood of boozy exuberance.
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The advice to refugees (sometimes in spoken word pieces) is unorthodox and frequently salacious. For example he counsels that if you want a happy life you should get yourself a Widow Bride and there are abundant references to the consolation of carnal pleasure.
However, the squalor and horror of the experience is never glossed over. In Plough The Shit, the world is likened to "an overflowing gutter" and the struggle to find a dignified means of survival is constantly highlighted.
Lullaby and Fledgling adopt a quieter, softer tone but, overall, the melodramatic theatricality comes over on record as exaggerated and overly brash.
Ben Caplan's website
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