Michael McDermott “Flowers From The Graveyard”

Anthemic songs of hard times and hope amidst the 99%.

Now well into his sixth decade, Michael McDermott keeps on producing records of quality from his home city of Chicago. The eagerly awaited Flowers From The Graveyard features eleven songs written by the artist and played by a well-honed band of collaborators that includes his wife, Heather Lynne Horton, and most of the team who played on his 2022 dual-release Lighthouse On The Shore and East Jesus.

The songs bear many of the hallmarks of a McDermott album and it bristles with opening chords that grab the attention and hold it until the very end. Choruses have an anthemic quality that sounds easy to create but probably isn’t and the overall sense is of a band hitting the open road with a couple of gas stops along the way. Once again, inevitable comparisons will be made with a stellar resident of New Jersey but along with the Boss, there’s something of Joe Walsh in McDermott’s delivery, his higher-register vocals commanding the attention.

Opening track The Best We Get has already featured in these pages and the pace continues with Always A Ways Away. The insistent Nobody opens with melodic piano and another road-worn vocal zipping through a litany of characters from the bookies, cheats and swindlers down at the lakeside liquor-store to the hustlers and the harlots that inhabit the decaying urban landscape. Placing himself centrefold in this nether world, McDermott repeats the refrain “I’m just a nobody nobody knows”. It’s a pessimistic song about living in modern-day America and it’s clear who McDermott is pointing the finger at when he looks ahead in The Future, the lyrics full of biting satire and spleen –

“I think it’s time we did some critical thinking
The Statue of Liberty has started sinking …
Here we don’t bow to any king
Certainly not a clown from Queens.”

The songs cover personal as well as social and political themes but the unifying element seems to be that life should be better than this. But For The Little Moments reflects on the small things that can make life worthwhile, when so much seems devoid of pleasure or meaning. Over the course of several songs this can paint a rather grim picture, as in Johnny Sparrow And The Sunset Girl, a tale of love and loss in New York City.

It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the pessimism of the lyrics with the upbeat feel of the album. Old Feelings and The Struggle Makes You Stronger maintain this paradoxical approach while The Lords Of Lincoln Park searches for hope amidst the surrounding gloom. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title track. Like a John Steinbeck novel, the idea that things can only get better is seen through the eyes of two characters down on their luck, one bringing flowers from a graveyard to serve as a lover’s gift.

It’s a bleak album in many ways but given the events of recent years, is that so surprising? The writer Stephen King considers Michael McDermott to be one of America’s finest songwriters and as a well-known Democrat himself, the two men are certainly on the same side of the political fence.