Ten songs packed with melody, musicianship and morals.
Having known each other for two decades, and after recording a live album in 2018, Tentrees and Haldane combine in a Nashville studio under the auspices of producer Nash (brother of Kacey) Chambers.
The pre-released pair ‘Time’ and ‘Arcata’ are both Tentrees songs: the former is a bluegrass number on county road time, where quad-biking, fishing and skinny dipping goes on because “nothing happens till we make it happen”; the latter is a musician’s picaresque journey in which his “lost, forlorn…blue” narrator drives through the redwoods to get home to his beloved and her “morning breath” down in that California town.
The quirky ‘Tinkering’, which appropriately took Tentrees two years to finish, begins with our narrator noting his “bald spot” and “dad bod”. As Toby Keith recently did, he advises the listener not to “let the old man in” and “give more than you take” over an insistent beat and a wibbly-wobbly fiddle-saw; best ignore the advice to “box a kangaroo”, though.
Tentrees also wrote ‘Bygone Days’, a Canadian history lesson which references the Indigenous trio of Kate Carmack, Elijah Smith and Edith Josie, with extra fiddle from Tania Elizabeth; the kicker is that people who help dig for gold are either “trying to get paid or trying to get laid”. The fiddle returns on ‘Crystal’, a chirpy Haldane composition whose arrangement is in opposition to the dangers of crystal meth (“I was her little puppet to play”).
Haldane, usually of Canadian band D. Rangers, goes back into his family history for ‘Bobbi & Gus’, his mum’s parents who “had two nickels between ’em” (as well as “two good legs” due to their respective amputations) and who taught their grandson about “freedom and tolerance, fairness and trust”. He thinks the listener might reckon he is “trying to demean ’em” but he’s doing nothing of the sort, especially with the charming arrangement and whistling solo.
He is, however, demeaned on the opening track ‘Drive or Push’, a 12-bar blues that begins with a car crash and ends with a punchline: “left me here, flipped me off in the rear-view mirror”. The word “ditch” makes you guess what’s coming but another b-word, “boy”, is used instead. Harmonica comes from the Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie McCoy.
On the head-noddin’ ‘Franklin’, where he offers a closing holler akin to Bob Wills, Haldane describes an old house, complete with “newspaper in the walls”, as “a palace” in which he and his beloved “get naughty”, and even notes its dimensions, “two-by-six” and “nine foot nine”. He plays mandolin on that song and on ‘Nowhere Fast’, a musical homage to ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ by The Band on which he complains of being “always indisposed” and of having “no R with the SVP”.
Closing track ‘Gratitude’, written by Tentrees, ends the album with more wise advice (“with a little sweat you can get your own ride”) and more of McCoy’s mouth organ. Let us hope this is not the pair’s last project together.
