I’m a little embarrassed to say that Michael Chapman’s new album 50 is my first exposure to this nonpariel British guitarist, singer and songwriter. After all, he gets name-checked alongside such greats as Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, and the title of this album commemorates his 50 years as a touring musician whose work has crossed, or rather eschewed, genres. A native of Leeds, Chapman has been a jazz guitarist and a teacher of photography in his long and storied career, and he has played and recorded prolifically since the 1960s. The list of artists with whom he has performed may be exceeded only by those he has influenced, including many of today’s crop of young lions like Ryley Walker.
Chapman calls this his “American record,” partly because of its themes, partly its soundscape, and partly because of his largely American roster of collaborators. Those include Steve Gunn, who produces, sings and plays guitar and drums; multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles (Black Twig Pickers); and Richard Thompson’s son-in-law James Elkington (The Rails, Tweedy) on guitar and piano.
This album is largely dark in theme and texture. Some of the 10 tracks apparently are radical reworkings of songs from his long and prolific career, but at least three are new. It’s hard to tell which are new and which are old because most of them deal with themes of aging and/or loss. “They tell me this road is a killer, you can tell by the wreckage it makes,” goes one of the lines in the opener, “A Spanish Incident (Ramón and Durango).” “So let’s go a little bit further, to see if we got what it takes.” There’s Durango, that Mexican state and its eponymous capital city, showing up like it does in several songs of the era, including at least one by Dylan. There are lots of echoes of Dylan here, and others who have used Mexico as a site of mis-adventures. This one reads like a present-tense diary entry and its set to a killer folk-rock arrangement, with banjo, drums and more backing Chapman’s energetically strummed acoustic guitar.
“Sometimes You Just Drive,” one of the new songs, is another tale of intimations of mortality. This one’s a bluesy shuffle, with a scorching slide guitar punctuating Chapman’s fingerpicking. The chilling “Memphis In Winter” is a thumping, shambling blues about the dark side of a city that’s no place to be poor or homeless because “you can die just beyond the lights.” The lyric’s air of menace is accentuated by percussive fingerpicking, a thudding kick drum, and occasional knifelike swish of cymbal.
For a bit of a change of pace, “The Prospector” is a Crazy Horse-like mid-tempo rocker, a stark ballad of working people getting nowhere. And another of the new songs, “Money Trouble,” sounds like something from the Holy Modal Rounders in the ’70s, a banjo-fied rocking shuffle with humorous lyrics and a rousing singalong chorus. It bumps up against what’s probably the darkest song, the last song on the vinyl LP, “That Time Of Night,” the album’s first single. Chapman’s gravelly baritone slurs the words a bit on this bleak, sad, slow ballad, with lovely backing vocal from Bridget St John. A high-reverb electric guitar emphasizes the lyric’s loneliness.
Bonus cuts on the CD include the beautiful new instrumental “Rosh Pina” and the surrealist psych-folk “Navigation.”
Michael Chapman’s 50 is a heck of an album. These songs sound as tough and durable as the guy who wrote and sings them. Recommended if you like Dylan, Prine, Jansch, Renbourn.
(Paradise of Bachelors, 2017)
