This is the title track from Al Rose’s latest album, the eighth by the singer-songwriter from Chicago. It’s a musing on a continuing attempt to a be a better person, with an equally continuous faltering and failure to fully live up to an ideal, as he sings: “I promised myself I’d never be bitter / Again and again and again / Still as a snake with the skin of a quitter.”
It’s been six years since Al Rose’s last album ‘Spin Spin Dizzy’, and the intervening years have seen, he suggests, authoritarian encroachment, COVID-19, and unstinting attacks on democracy at home and abroad. The ideal subjects to use as a basis for the thirteen songs that make up ‘Again the Beginner‘, and to try and find a way to make sense of that sinking feeling that can so often pervade modern life.