An appealing laid-back brew of blues, soul and country with gentle swing and groove.
Scarborough-based Phil Hooley is the founder of the alt-country band The Woolgatherers. Everything We’ll Never Need is his third solo album after Provenance (2023) and Songs from the Back Room (2021). He is on vocals and guitar, but has teamed up with a number of top Nashville session players. It is a slight surprise to learn that he is a Yorkshire lad, because this album very much has an American feel. It is laid-back americana with a very nice brew of country, soul, and blues that reminds you of Dave Alvin and Rodney Crowell.
Having said that, the first track, Cowboy Dreaming, has more than a whiff of the English band Dire Straits, with slide guitar picking to give it a country feel. It is a weird tale of a city-dweller going out to the Wild West to become a cowboy and apparently ending up stepping outside for a fight with Donald Trump. Like so many others here, it is a good song with warm, soothing vocals from Hooley and a melody which pops unannounced into your head as you go about your daily business. Throughout, the tracks have a lovely gentle swing and groove with country licks from guitar or pedal steel. It is altogether a calming and enjoyable listen.
The words here are generally serious and often tinged with sadness, although there is positivity on the second track, House For Sale, which has sax, piano and organ added. Here there are happy memories of family life in a home now being sold. The languid swing of Time On My Hands has the singer having a lazy day thinking of his lover. The low-key honky-tonk of One More For The Road asks a woman to take him on even though he has “plenty of miles behind me, and one or two more to go”. Tomorrows is a poignant story of a faded country singer, “So she paints her smile on one more time/ papers over the cracks”, still dreaming of a better tomorrow.
No Guarantees is addressed to a lover who has left him, advising that it might not work out quite as well as she hopes. Best Remedy In Town, with harmonica, has him wanting some good-time songs to chase away his blues: ”Play me a happy one, or I’ll be drowning in my drink”. Walking Man with Tex-Mex brass tells of intolerance towards a ramblin’ man: “He has no cross to bear, he’s never broken any law/ But if they could just make one up, they’d lock him up for sure”.
The penultimate Hope Street is Robert Cray-style blues with Wurlitzer, organ and extended guitar solos. Hooley has it as the centrepiece of the album, dealing with people’s need, on social media, “to represent their lives as perfect, as something to be envied… This illusion of reality is in stark contrast to what is really happening in the world”. He says that the closer, Sticky Toffee Pudding, which deals with various desserts such as Tapioca, Spotted Dick and Jam Roly Poly, but also his feelings for his lover, is an “oddity”. He felt “duty bound” to put it out, as the most requested track at the merch table, and it is a nice, memorable antidote to the more serious stuff.
Hooley has had some success, playing at the Black Deer Festival and supporting the likes of Robert Vincent, Chris Difford and Ags Connolly. This is a good album, which will appeal to many americana fans, and you hope it will bring him more recognition and success.
