This album begins with Spring Forward (Fall Back) a one joke song about the give and take of daylight saving time changes. The closing tune - How To Leave A Room - was saved for posterity on a portable tape recorder in a treehouse.
The rest of the tracks, recorded more conventionally in a Minneapolis studio, feel equally ramshackle and spontaneous but less flippant. A greater sense of substance derives from lessons learned from the all too familiar missteps and heartaches of life. Fahey, now in his mid fifties, has plenty of life experience to draw upon.
Perhaps the key song is Not That I Could Change A Thing in which he looks back without regret and resolves to "stick with what feels true". This is the kind of pragmatics that fuels an album of 15 songs drawn from the 100 or so songs written into the wee small hours for February Album Writing Month as part of an international online writing community.
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Combining elements of rock, pop and country music, Fahey runs the full gamut of emotions from the angst and pain of Stable Wounds to the bright hopefulness of A New September Song.
The upshot is that, while sometimes we hit low points and get a sense of Ophelia's Blues, the human instinct is to spring forward rather than fall back.
In other words, this is an album from a man who is still very much awake and, in the words of "The Late Believers, "knows what it's like to be alive".
Joe Fahey's website
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