Reviews

David Coller
Album: When Summer Comes
Label: Upstart Yankee
Tracks: 15
Website: https://www.davidcoller.com/

Making his recording debut in 1995 before taking a 15-year hiatus from performing, three decades on Connecticut-based Coller now releases his sophomore album, aided and abetted by wife Diane Chodkowski on harmonies, Rusty Park on pedal steel, drummer Eric Parker, bassist Mark Dann and Brian Mitchell on accordion with, save for one track, Sara Milonovich on fiddle. Musically, he's very much 60s troubadour folk with the most obvious reference point being Tom Paxton though a less sonorous Stan Rogers also comes to mind, opening unaccompanied with 'Let Nothing Come Between Us', a protest song in response to how "The winds of hatred fan the flames/That burn across this nation/As men of wealth seek to destroy/This marvelous creation" as he declares "welcome, one and all/There's room here at this table …kind friends and neighbors near at hand/Or stranger from a far-off land/As family with you we stand".

Rani Arbo guesting on fiddle, the fingerpicked 'Lillian's Voice' was written after a friend said he'd miss his daughter's voice when she went to college and speaks of the loss felt when your children fly the nest ("The ghosts of the childhood you watched come and go/The glass full of marbles, the doll with no eyes/Whose greatest of gifts is that she never cries/The postcards and posters and old broken toys/All carry the echoes of Lillian's voice").

A jaunty folk blues, 'Tucson' draws on when he used to go backpacking in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and turns it into a cautionary tale about trekking a hot trail ("Eat when you're hungry, drink when you're dry/Walk while the sun is still low in the sky and/Don't lose your way or you surely will die…Up in the mornin', by noon you're half dead/By nightfall you're diggin' in a dry river bed/Six foot of sand then a slab of dry stone/And you're wonderin' if you're gonna die here alone").

The next two tracks are thematically linked by contrasting scenarios. The swayalong title song is about that small town guy who somehow never managed to uproot himself ("Well I get up late, walk down the block/Open the store and punch the clock/Wipe down the glass and push the broom/And set my sights on getting through another afternoon") but is happy with their life whereas the gently waltzing 'Wherever You Are' is about how those small towns and their people are slowly disappearing ("Darkness is falling/On this little town/Main Street has started/On its last go-round…So lock up the back door/And turn out the light/Whisper one last prayer/Say one last "good night"/Leave the key in the mailbox/And latch up the gate…Drive out past the graveyard/On the outskirts of town/Where all of my people/Sleep underground/Then on past those old farms/Through the fields of dry corn/And I bet we make Cleveland/By the first light of dawn")m though both are about how home is wherever your other half is.

As the album title suggests, there's a seasonal thread running throughout with the sprightly 'Balance of the Season' being the mixed feelings that autumn brings, the mellow fruitfulness but also the signpost of cooler spells ahead (read whatever metaphors about growing older you like into that)and is aptly enough followed by the banjo dappled 'Winter's Here' ("tearing through the mountains like a hungry bear …gonna blow like the devil for a hundred years/And not a chance in hell of an early thaw") with its Burl Ives colours.

The songs spanning across the years, from 2012 the dreamy accordion-shaded 'I'll Take The Moon' (a chanson a la Charles Aznavour) was his first proper love song ("Your laughing eyes, the dancers' sway, this tender love, this small café/Are like a dream that I once had/If it could be like this for life, I'd gladly do it over twice" and, in answer to the lyric question which poet wrote "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou" it's from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Relating to his lengthy hiatus, the whimsical jaunty ragtime-ish 'We're Sinkin'' relates to an autobiographical experience with his gaff-rigged schooner Renegade, the title suggesting it was well-named while, another bouncy number with bluegrass undertones 'Trouble/Liberty' is a post-breakup regret ditty that embraces the traditional instrumental duet between fiddle and guitar.

Protest surfaces again, this of an environmentalist nature, with the reflective circling hymnal notes of 'Small Blue Island' ("The barren field, the empty sky/The lifeless ocean, the hopeless cry/What will you have when it comes to this?...When these things go they're gone for good/Just like the elm trees in your neighborhood… Will it be said of this sacred place/That it was wasted on us, the human race?"). Moving to the final tracks, 'Why Not Today' is a nimbly picked, fiddle dancing memory of an old summer relationship, the lazy rhythm 'Sorry Blues' is basically about feeling left behind as things change ("And all the songs I want to hear/Went off the radio sometime last year/Now everything they play has got that same sad, sorry sway… all my good friends are out of town/And all them other friends don't come around/Doesn't matter anyway because there's nothin' they could say") while, the longest track, as you'd image 'Class of '63', with a spoken intro and inspired by an old school photo ("the kids I used to run with, laugh and cry and shout and fight/They're all shining there like diamonds caught in living black and white") is another steeped in nostalgia that reflects on what happened to them ("Marybeth got pregnant on the day she turned sixteen/And Susanna sings the high parts at a clip joint down in Queens/Well Martha went to law school, Ricky went to jail/Jesus bought The Paradise, hawking beer and cheap cocktails") and a fond memory of an old sweetheart ("I sure do miss my Jeannie with the mostly light brown hair").

Written in 1999, it ends, aptly enough, with 'Goodbye, Goodbye', a wry and whimsical yearning for a life without ties and responsibilities where you could just pick up stick and ride the rails (freight train whistle included) and of leaving them behind when they come calling (" I got a letter from my lover in Alaska…And she says she's got a bubbly bouncing baby/And it looks a lot like me/By the time her train was steamin' towards the station/I was halfway back to Saskatoon"). And as for old age regrets about not putting down roots, well "the only way I'm likely to settle sooner/Is six feet under ground".

Old school in all the best ways, career-wise Coller's summer may have taken a while to come around but the weather is most certainly warm and inviting and with an EP of sea music and another album in the works, the forecast is most definitely clement.

Mike Davies

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