![]() ![]() This comes across most beautifully on “Abigail For A While,” which features Nelson on backing vocals and Ben Cosgrove adding an understated piano accompaniment. ![]() In some cases, this is about the connection between you and one other person. This is an album about knowing yourself and being true–two essential elements to finding home and community. But of all the experiences Max and Sophie had on this trip, perhaps the most salient is expressed in the song this way: “We stopped asking everyone’s permission / And we found out it wasn’t theirs to give.” Thanksgiving in the Wal-Mart parking lot / Transmission busted on our motorhome.” Suffice to say, the doubts that some friends and family expressed about the suitability of the vehicle came to pass. “If we make it back to New York,” Conover begins after a thrumming finger-picked introduction, “We’ll tell them all about New Mexico. The album’s title track references an actual motorhome that Conover and his wife Sophie Nelson bought in 2014 to tour the US. Scared hearts don’t love.” Those are lines you earn through lots of paring down to only the words you need, allowing plenty of space for the listener. We knew good love and we knew it ‘cause we never called it ours.” The song is a good example of Conover’s ability to slip little adages into his stories that help reset your perspective: “Scared money don’t win. It segues well to the next track, “Grand Marquis,” a tapestry of memories, orbiting around the chorus: “My lady put a lot of weight on the pedal, riding home in the light of the stars. Culminating with the line, “Honey, I won’t wait for the sun anymore,” the song sets us up for the album’s thematic searching for place and purpose. Motorhome begins with a sense of and dislocation, dissatisfaction and restlessness that propels “ New Sweden ,” the first song: “Wasn’t this, wasn’t this, wasn’t this supposed be temporary, just to pay the bills a bit?” Conover wrote the song on a pizza box in Stockholm, Maine on a break during a marathon set at Eureka Music Hall and it reminds me of the humor and frustration in “Maggie’s Farm.” Conover sings: “In New Sweden, there’s a man I know, / And he makes his money working for rich folks, / And he says, the sun only shines on them.” The tempo alternates between lulling fingerpicking and breakneck strumming, setting a tone for the album: the songs shift and grow, expand and contract. For Conover, there is more a sense of seeking a place to shape into a home that I think is, for many of us, reflective of what it means to grow up and really know yourself. For Taylor, that community swells and retracts like breathing. ![]() It isn’t the coincidence of dates that makes me write about these albums together it is the thread of warmth, community, and vulnerability that runs through them both. My two favorite songwriters are releasing new albums on Friday: Mike Taylor ( Hiss Golden Messenger ) and Max García Conover. ![]()
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