A bit of a treasure trove from Neal Casal’s formative years.
In the wake of Neal Casal’s untimely and tragic death, the Neal Casal Music Foundation, a non-profit organisation which provides musical instruments and lessons to students in New Jersey and New York state schools where Casal was born and raised, has done much to keep his name alive. They were behind the triple album release Highway Butterfly, which had a host of musicians covering songs from Casal’s career.
Their latest venture is “No One Above You (The Early Years 1991-1998)”, a collection of 13 songs, initially demos really, which have been posthumously tidied up and embellished by Casal’s long-time friend and collaborator, the Grammy Award-winning producer Jim Scott. The album is released in tandem with a book of rare and unseen photographs, “No One Above You (Christy Coleman + Neal Casal – A Love Story In Photographs)”, compiled by his former wife, Christy Coleman.
While we have no way of knowing here what the original recordings sounded like, Scott has certainly polished them to the extent that all of them sound like the finished article. Sure enough, there’s little of Casal’s sometime wanderings into full-blown cosmic americana territory and no real guitar showcases. Instead, it zooms in on Casal’s nascent writing talent along with a few nods to some of his influences. It’s a very welcome and eminently listenable venture, an intimate peek into his already burgeoning talent, as most of these songs were recorded prior to the release of his first solo album.
There’s a strong element of LA country rock on several of the songs here, shades of Gene Clark come to mind at times, while one song at least (‘Mellow Down Easy’) reminds this reviewer of Poco, but Casal comes out here pretty much fully formed as a writer. The opening song, ‘Silver Dollar’, is a stone-cold classic waiting to be discovered, a song which might sound like the Eagles but which kicks them way out of the park. ‘Someone Else’s Shoes’ resounds with slippery and sliding guitars creating a grand country rock sound, while ‘The Search For Silver Lake’ is candied cosmic country with its gliding pedal steel guitar. Meanwhile, ‘Running Wild’ (with harmony vocals from Angie McKenna) harks to America’s wide open spaces with more than a hint of Appalachia in it. There’s more heft in the guitar wired ‘After All This Time’, but it’s on ‘The Valley Of The Fallen’ that Casal truly excels, his guitar work snaking throughout a bustling background of mandolin and fiddle as the band shuffle away. It’s an incredible listen.
There are four cover versions on the album. Casal delivers Floyd Westermann’s ‘Quiet Desperation’ with a grand flourish, sounding like Jackson Browne in his heyday. On two numbers written by one of his heroes, Tom T. Hall, the songs are relatively stripped back. ‘Running Wild’ comes across as a frontier song in the best The Band tradition, while ‘Second Handed Flowers’ is given a much more delicate and sensitive delivery than Hall’s tear-stained original. And while it may be seen to be a bit of an oddity, Casal’s rendition of Mike Heron’s (The Incredible String Band) ‘Greatest Friend’ fits well into the occasional hints of Appalachia that flit throughout the album.
Finally, there is ‘Cora Jones’, a song written by Casal when he was living in Wisconsin and read of the murder of a local 12-year-old girl. His account is an aching murder ballad with tinges of Christmas melancholy. Set to the melody of Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportees’, it’s incredibly moving, more so perhaps in the knowledge that Casal isn’t around any more to write a similar song.
It’s a relief and a joy that there’s no scraping of the barrel here. “No One Above You” is an exquisite insight into Casal’s early years.
