Looks like we’ve slid into a bit of a power-pop path to end the week on – well if that’s what happened then that’s what it is. You’ll be familiar, assiduous Americana UK reader, with Grand Canyon who hail out of LA and embody a classic sound from the tail-end of the “long sixties” – so somewhere around 1968 to about, oh, 1974-ish. There’s a joyful embracing of freedom on ‘Forevermore‘ that might bring any number of people to mind – a bit of Petty, a bit of Zevon. These are not comparisons that Grand canyon baulk at – “hey,” they might say, “that’s great music – and if we sound like that then, hey, this might just be great music too.” And they’d have a point.
The song is the title track of the band’s new album – and it’s a Covid album to the extent that songwriters Joe Guese and Casey Shea turned Shea’s garage into a makeshift studio and taught themselves to record, engineer, produce, and mix the recently released ‘Forevermore.’ It’s also a Bible inspired album, although not necessarily a religious album as such – Shea’s other Covid challenge was to read the bible from cover to cover. Even the Appendixes on genealogy and different languages (err…are we thinking of ‘The Lord of the Rings’?). Whatever – Shea found stories and characters that resonated and drew on these for an album that Grand Canyon feels has a greater consistency because of this. As Shea explained: “As kids, albums meant something to us – they still mean something to me; I’d rather listen to an album than a playlist. So I mean, it may be against better judgment, but it was important to us to release these songs together.”
