Nine mostly melancholy tunes from the talented Canadian singer/songwriter.
William Prince’s gruff croon is familiar to Radio 2 audiences, and he recently opened for Midland at their three UK shows. His fifth album is the first not to be produced by Dave Cobb; instead, Liam Duncan mans the boards.
‘On Rolls the Wheels’ and ‘For The First Time’ were both pre-released to trail the album. The former is a road song where he sings in the character of a lonely long-haul driver whose destination, as he mutters in a barely audible coda, “only matters to me”. The latter is a comforting acoustic ballad on which he has finally moved on “for the first time, in a long time”. The lyric of the middle section, “it don’t break me like it used to”, is primed for sing-alongs and is followed by a squealing passage of guitar.
The title track (“knock ’em dead when you finally get to the city”) is driven by a strong beat and a fiddle which scrapes underneath Prince’s lead vocals. Precisely halfway through, the tenor of the song changes, with a dobro replacing the fiddle and Prince’s voice slathered in reverb as he realises what he has left behind. In the final minute, the song returns to the initial rhythm, giving the song a sonata form.
‘Damn’ opens with the line “the emptiness is piling up” and stays in this melancholy mood. “Life as we know it will probably stay the same,” he sings, but there is a shard of light when he gees himself up, telling himself that he is capable of changing. This may resonate with a listener and force them into action, too. There follows a pensive minute-long outro that closes the album’s first side. ‘The Charmer’ (“rides again”) adopts the same mood, as a family man reaches the end of his life with the same bonhomie as he usually adopts, “making jokes with all the nurses”.
‘Thousand Miles of Chain’ chugs along with some resonant baritone guitar to underscore the song’s gloomy poetic language: “devil’s hand”, “constricting like a snake” and “the dark inside is killing me”, as well as the assonant “devices and idols”. For a brief slice of variation, ‘Flowers on the Dash’ (“cos she don’t want ’em”) appears, a country song with a twanging solo, while the toe-tapper ‘All The Same’ is the musical setting for a rueful lyric of lost love where “booze and powder” played its part in his downfall.
The album ends on a high with the joyous love song ‘More of the Same’, where Prince’s words are finally able to match the music, and he is, mercifully, content and grateful that good things have come to him at last. “Love chose me and I chose to receive it…how can I complain?” he muses, comparing his love to “strawberry pie”. After eight sombre tunes on this excellent album, it is great to hear that the singer can make room for happiness in his life.
