‘All I Can Share is Photos‘ is taken from the upcoming new album by E.G. Phillips ‘At Home at Sea‘. It’s the second album from the San Franciscan indie-folk singer/songwriter and features his slyly humorous, and sneakily affecting music. It’s singer-songwriter folk shot through with a cocktail jazz sensibility. You might hear touches of Vivian Stanshall, and thereby a frisson of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.
These anglophile references are underlined as Phillips admits to having little half-hidden nods to a certain TARDIS dwelling and ever-changing Time Lord. So listen up for that. It’s a feature of Phillips’ songwriting that fits with his agile vocabulary; you won’t likely hear too many tunesmiths that can work in words like ‘funicular’ and ‘concentric’ so deftly. As he says “Words are wonderful toys, there’s a lot of meaning imbued in particular words. There’s what you can do with sound as you string things together. There are concepts that you can relate to each other that may not seem immediately related, but you can create a picture using images. There’s an old saw that you hear with creative writing — ‘show, don’t tell,’ — which is something that I’ve brought to bear with my songwriting. It’s much more powerful and much more emotive to paint a picture that will resonate with people, as opposed to just stating something directly.”
