An excellent solo performance of songs plucked from Leger’s back catalogue.
Fast becoming a favourite on the UK live circuit, either solo or with his band The Situation, Canada’s Jerry Leger at times seems too good to be true. He’s got a great image, reminiscent of Dylan in his 60’s heyday (with a favourite brown suede jacket to boot) and, much like Dylan back then, he can switch from romantic troubadour to fiery rock’n’roll with his band channelling, well, The Band, alongside such disparate influences such as the Stones and the Brill Building school of songwriters. He has a champion in the shape of Ron Sexsmith who has said of him that “Leger has that spark in him that all the great songwriters have. He’s the real deal.”
On ‘Lucky Streak – Latent Lounge, Live From The Hangar’ we get the solo side of Leger. The title of the disc is slightly misleading as it’s not a live album, instead it was recorded live at Michael Timmons’ (of The Cowboy Junkies) studio The Hangar in Toronto with Leger picking a bunch of songs from his back catalogue and bringing them up to date. As Leger says, “Since late 2013, we have recorded a lot of music in this room together, all of which has been released on the label, Latent Recordings. The idea was to pick a bunch of my songs from the past and present and I’d perform them solo, either the way they were written or the way they’ve evolved.” It’s an intriguing way to offer up a “best of” or “greatest hits” album and is all the better for that as the songs, some familiar, others less so, emerge unadorned as it were reminding the listener that Leger is as compelling on his own some as he is with a band.
There are three songs from his most recent album ‘Donlands’, including a much more grounded version of ‘Out There Like The Rain’ which, stripped of its gossamer band production, is ten times sadder. However the bulk of the album finds Leger stretching back. From his 2006 album ‘Farewell Ghost Town’ there’s ‘On Your Own’, here played on piano with Leger saying he sings it much better these days while ‘Drive Me Away Tonight’ (from 2008’s ‘You, Me & The Horse’) is decidedly more muscular than on the spindly original. Early Dylan looms over the energetic delivery of ‘Baby’s Got A Rare Gun’ but Leger more than stakes a claim to be an original presence on his excellent deliveries of ‘Early Riser’ and ‘Factory Made’, a song surely written for these times. Leger closes the album with ‘Angella’, a song he says he wrote when he was 15. If so it’s a decidedly mature song for such a youngster as he paints a picture of an ingénue who could easily exist within a Leonard Cohen song as she wanders from the straight and narrow, lured by the temptation of “wild highways.” It’s the topping on the cake here on an album which serves to posit that Leger is surely one of the best songwriters we have around us these days.
