Peaceful and contemplative acoustic offering is a balm for the soul.
Recording as Jonathan Something, his birth name having been shed some years before, Jonathan Searles has recorded a number of albums, all of them unpredictable in style, ranging from garage rock to synth pop. His music had been described as “delightfully bizarre“, and he revelled in producing songs that surprised, refusing to stick with any one particular sound. 2020 found Searles questioning his love for music; it wasn’t bringing him the same joy. Reasoning that, to rekindle his passion, he needed to step away from writing and recording, it has taken until now for him to step into the breach once more.
What has come out of the other side of this intermission is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a million miles away from those early albums. One More Lonesome Cowboy Song plays as a laid-back and contemplative piece of work. This is a one-man-band show, with Searles alone playing all instruments as well as the recording and producing. Songs are constructed layer by layer, fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars with hushed, serenely double-tracked vocals.
Opening tracks do not always set the scene for what is to come, but Searles has gone on record to say that Country Rose was exactly the starting point he was looking for. He describes the song as the most autobiographical on the album and, with its slow and meditative meanderings, the mood of the whole record is set. Searles’ probing self-reflections lie at the heart of the album, but he offers little in the way of answers or prescriptions, positing instead that reflection alone can be its own reward.
Dancer In The Sky stands out with a vocal and style that could easily have been pulled straight out of the Moody Blues playbook, while The Garden is a beautifully realised song, with the timbre of Searles’ vocals a perfect match for the reflective tone of the song. “I do believe I have begun to redefine the things I thought I knew when I was young, the power and the passion and the pleasure and the pain, was it an illusion or just one big silly game?”
In rekindling his love for music after five years away, this is clearly the album that Searles wanted to make, and, as a whole, the music flows, segueing seamlessly from one track to the next, but without ever really making a truly lasting impression. That said, it is, however, a wonderfully peaceful album that will resonate with those seeking some serenity of their own.
