Masterful songs of grief and wonder on an exceptional album of nuanced folk rock.
Clever Hopes is the vehicle for the songs of Andrew Shaver and this is his third album. His first two albums were excellent examples of folk rock, with a hint of country in places, recorded live off the floor in the studio. For this album, whilst he has kept several of the musicians from the last album, he has worked with award-winning producer Daniel Ledwell, who has kept the Clever Hopes sound but given it subtlety and a wider sonic range, which creates a sympathetic setting for Shaver’s songs.
Shaver has worked in theatre as an actor and director, hosts a nationally syndicated radio show, as well as being a sought-after voice-over artist. However his day job as a therapeutic clown in a healthcare environment, Drewfus, helping children and families through challenging times as well as a tragedy closer to home, helped to influence most of these songs. Through his work and his own experience of parenthood, Shaver had begun to reflect on how we need to remain open to delight and wonder whilst dealing with life and its array of challenges. What he has produced with Ledwell is an album of deceptively upbeat and even pop-oriented songs, with subtle arrangements and beautifully crafted lyrics. Even the song titles are redolent of struggle; Holding On, Keep On Going, Showed Up And Tried, Fumbled Dreams, False Starts and Long Way Round sound almost weary and fatalistic, but Shaver finds ways lyrically and musically to bring hope and positivity to them. The album title reflects this, being something that his son, Auden, said to him when he asked him how his second day at School had been, “It was even gooder than tomorrow.”
The opening track Holding On sets the mood, with a relaxed but up-front drum pattern overlaid with picked guitars, keyboards and vocals. Shaver’s warm vocals recall Sam Beam and elements of Josh Tillman and hold the melody undemonstratively but firmly. As the song progresses, stabs of brass and female backing vocals come in leading to a mellow lead guitar solo in the outro. Lyrically it opens with another couplet borrowed from Auden (who hopefully is getting songwriting credits) something said to his mother at bedtime “Come lay with me a minute, We can be with our dreams”. As such it goes on to outline all the good reasons that we have to hold on.
Second track is Keep On Going, which lyrically reflects one of the darkest periods of Shaver’s life when his partner miscarried. However, this is one track in particular where the producer’s influence held sway, where he kept encouraging Shaver to up the beats and push the song along musically. Shaver notes he came to realise that what Ledwell had seen was what the song was actually about; “I hadn’t written a song about getting through. I had written the thing that got me through”. It opens with an insistent and urgent drum pattern and slightly treated vocals accompanied by electric slide guitar. The use of brass is interesting as an English reference would be almost a colliery brass band sound. As the song comes to the last line, Shaver’s voice is pitched higher and let loose more ecstatically in a long held note over the guitar and drums before the outro becomes more muted colliery brass.
The keynote themes of the album are best expressed in two adjacent tracks, Fumbled Dreams and Do It All Again. Fumbled Dreams again lyrically addresses the miscarriage and how it affected him and his partner. However, it starts with a steady backbeat and an almost jaunty guitar riff as Shaver sings the first verses. At the first chorus the vocals are doubled as the featured vocalist Jenn Grant joins him. She then takes the lead vocals for the next verse including the key lines of the song. These are borrowed from his partner’s reflections after the event “My heart is just aching, I never really knew what that meant.” Shaver wisely felt that these needed a female vocal to carry them off effectively. The second chorus again sees both vocals in harmony, and the final verse sees them rising in pitch to a point of pain and release. A song that absolutely points out how grief and wonder can sit side by side.
To counterpoint this, Do It All Again is a pretty much verbatim run-through of a day spent with his son, Auden, before running through a sequence of the questions a small child asks at bedtime to stave off the inevitable lights out. Shaver as narrator reflects in a simple chorus how he would “Do it all again if I could”. The whole song is mellow and upbeat and Shaver tackles a subject that could be trite in lesser hands with a refreshing and engaging openness. The song acts to offset the more challenging lyrics on the album and indicates how wonder and joy can be found in the simple things if you listen openly.
This is a short but lyrically and musically rich album, with an immediacy of melody to pull you in but the lyrical depth and subtlety of arrangement, that causes you to return and listen again. Melodically and emotionally satisfying.
