Reflections of grief and loss enlivened with classical accompaniment.
Townsend’s Solitaire is a Seattle chamber-folk sextuplet brought together by Bobby Odle. Odle is a bi-polar singer-songwriter and, on ‘Glad To Be Alive’, he set out to produce a meditation on two culturally stigmatized topics that have impacted greatly on his life – grief and suicidal ideation.
To this end Odle has surrounded himself with quite an ensemble of like-minded musicians of classical persuasion so, as well as featuring his distinctive vocals, the album features piano, flute, violin, cello, clarinet and ocarina. Not your run-of-the-mill Americana line-up perhaps but engaging just the same.
The album was recorded live to tape and the rawness this gives to some tracks seems a perfect match for the searingly honest and affecting themes at play here. Odle lost his brother to cancer when he was 13 and on the sparse ‘Little Brothers’ with its faint hiss of tape, the sound of fingers moving over guitar strings and a voice that almost cracks with grief, that recording style pays handsome dividends.
There is a touch of an early Steve Forbert in Odle’s vocals at times and, if occasionally those vocals can feel strained as he reaches for higher notes, they seem to reflect the emotion that feed this musician. It is a man fully immersed in his own grief and personal struggles who is, in spite of a whole heap of obstacles, including the grief of losing a constellation of those closest to him, trying desperately to see the light in life.
This dichotomy plays out in the title track, one of the most optimistic and up-tempo songs on the album as this singer, who struggles with suicidal ideation, muses that “Even if I’m not happy, I can still be glad to be alive.”
‘Glad To Be Alive’ can be summed up as a reflective and brutally candid storyteller’s album wrapped in the warmth of classical accompaniment. The rawness of the singing and the difficult subject matter are a perfect fit for the live record, but it is those talented classical players with whom Odle has partnered that prevent the album turning into a what could have been a difficult listen. In Odle’s own words, there is a catharsis in knowing you are not alone, and there is a definite feel here of the singer reaching out to those similarly struggling through life and loss.
