This fine album combines poetic and poignant lyrics together with some slick lap steel fingerpicking. It is the follow-up to ‘Little Thunderstorms’(2020)and ‘Flatlands’ (2022).
For guitar nerds out there, Bayley plays a Tom Buchanan Weissenborn or a squareneck dobro from Colorado.
The artist named KB is from north-east England who grew up in the south-east and now spends a lot of time on England’s east-coast. The confessions could therefore, in theory, stem from any one of these east sides.
Bayley says: “At some subconscious level these songs are about the influence of place and memory on who we are - and the complexities in identity that can create.” The title track relates to his father imparting some harsh truths of life albeit in lieu of any deeper wisdom.
The Light Through the Trees is a ‘I should’ve know better’ song and a sombre reminder that the light at the end of a tunnel (or in this case through the trees) is not always what it seems. Don’t Let the Rain Fall on My Face is about looking for salvation from the pov of a man at the end of his life (maybe he’s left it a little late!)
Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime is a nice slowed down version of the much covered Korgi’s classic that emphasises the melancholy very effectively. This is one of four covers, the others being Gretchen Peters’s Love and Texaco, Patty Griffin’s That Kind of Lonely and John Renbourn’s White House Blues. In the latter, Roosevelt is US president but the ‘hard times’ resonate with the present incumbent.
The laid-back mood of the record effortlessly conjures up a mood of gentle nostalgia and quiet yearning.
