The new release from Yarn gives us reason to be grateful to be alive.
“Born, Blessed, Grateful, & Alive” is Yarn’s first new studio album in eight years. It’s not hard to unravel Yarn. They’ve been knitted into the fabric of Americana since their beginnings in 2006 at Kenny’s Castaway, a fondly remembered club in Greenwich Village. They’ve been nominated for four Grammys and have continued to maintain a presence on the road and in the studio, averaging 170 live performance a year and releasing ten studio albums. They’ve shared stages with the likes of Alison Krause, the Lumineers, Dwight Yoakam, Marty Stewart, Charlie Daniels and Jim Lauderdale.
Yarn has always been a loosely knit group centred around Blake Christiana, who is the singer and writer. Though the lineup keeps changing, the stalwarts are the rhythm section of drummer Robert Bonhomme and bassist Rick Bugel. While it’s been a while since their last studio album and this isn’t the travelling band, as Christiania said “It seemed right to keep the name Yarn going on this record, we’ve always been evolving, our sound has forever been doing whatever it wants to do. That is Yarn and this is our next chapter.” Joining Christiana, Bonhomme, and Bugel are an all-star line up including guitarists Mike Robinson (Railroad Earth), Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters), and Mike Sivilli (Dangermuffin), bassist Johnny Grubb (Railroad Earth), harmony vocalists Heather Hannah and Elliott Peck (Midnight North), and keyboardist Damian Calcagne. The producers are Calcange and Christiana.
From the run on the piano that starts the first song, ‘Turn Off the News’, you know this is going to be a good time. Not a crazy, outa-your-mind good time, but in the joy you get listening to musicians who enjoy what they do and do it well; playing carefully crafted songs sung by the man who wrote them. As the song says; “There is a party out there/it’s waiting on you and what a shame it be would not to find it/so turn off the news and shake off those blues/life is short but sweet if you make it.” It starts well and it just keeps getting better.
There is a bit of something for everybody, or at least any Americana aficionado. There’s a bit of honkytonk keyboards joining solid slide guitar along with a great rhythm section who play as close as brothers from different mothers. They all come together to play compositions that vary from soon to be classic road songs (‘Traveling Kind’ and ‘Nomad Man’) celebrating loners moving on to one about what keeps ya at home (‘I Want You’) and the Hammond B3 organ driven ‘These Words Alone’ would be at home on any flyover-zone AM Christian radio playlist.
In an odd way, these different stories bring us all a bit closer together. Maybe it is as Christiana says, “No one has any idea why we’re here, what we’re supposed to be doing here or what comes next, and there are very few things in this life to connect us to one another, other than the fact that we all don’t know these things,” he says. “I like to think our music could be one of the places where we can connect.”
