Matt Patershuk - An Honest Effort (2021)

It’s impossible not to like an album that features Steve Dawson on pedal steel on a song called Shane MacGowan about how the former Pogues frontman’s new dentures may light up the room with his brand new smile. Unfortunately, his dentures get in the way when he sings his old songs with the magnetic pins picking up the radio. Delivered in a John Prine style, the folksy Canadian troubadour Matt Patershuk playfully adds how one of them is cast in gold and named in honour of Fairytale Of New York and “he’ll let you touch it if you like, if you’re fast enough, sometimes he’ll still bite”.

There are, however, a further ten good reasons for adding An Honest Effort to your album collection. One gets underway with Johanna, the steady walking rhythm story of a woman who walked away on her life to fly back to who she used to be because “some birds just weren’t meant to be caged even with an open door”.

It’s followed by the six-minute Jupiter The Flying Horse, with Dawson on Weissenborn. Inspired by a Barnum and Bailey circus poster, the song recasts the familiar love across the tracks theme in the novel story of a star circus stallion who falls for a mare of lower breeding. There’s a second equine tale too, Clever Hans recounting the real-life horse who, at the start of the last century, could apparently perform incredible arithmetical and intellectual tricks. It turned out he was watching the crowds’ reactions and responding to his trainer’s involuntary body language, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive, and the song duly acknowledges as much.

Elsewhere, Sunny echoes the theme of the opening song with another woman seeking a new and better life, running away from an abusive relationship (“He’d fold the caps of his Miller Lites/ Between forefinger and thumb/As if to show the others/A threat of things to come”). Meanwhile, with mandolin trilling in the background and with bluesy electric guitar licks, Turn The Radio On takes an opposite approach with a middle-aged couple still comfortable in their relationship. With Dawson again on echoey Weissenborn providing the coda, the sparse Afraid To Speak Her Name sketches a poignant moment of being transfixed by a moment of beauty.

By way of a switch of lyrical concerns, the old-time waltzing 1.3 Miles (premiered here on Folk Radio) with Fats Kaplin on fiddle follows the trajectory of a bullet narrowly missing several potential targets as it flies “on its way to who knows where” before its energy is spent, serving as a metaphor for fate and how close it might come to change our lives on a daily basis. The cowboy campfire trot-along Stay With Me strays into harmonica saloon country territory to reflect on mortality as past and present blur as the end of life approaches with Keri Latimer on harmonies. On a less existential note, The 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics turns attention to physics and the notion that all objects in the universe tend towards entropy or disorder; it’s not a stretch to see the metaphor for relationships as he sings, “Eventually each whole becomes two”.

He ends with minimal banjo back in play on the sparsely arranged Upright, a tribute to his Liverpudlian grandmother, Mary Riley, “the flower of old Scottie Road”, a force of nature who was arrested aged 73 for protesting the UK’s development of nuclear arms and confronted a Freemason’s Lodge as to why they wouldn’t let women and Catholics into the club, who may have been knocked down but always got back to her feet standing tall with pride, dignity and defiance. Playful, tender, thoughtful and moving, another reminder that Patershuk is one of the finest songwriters around, it’s an A for effort and accomplishment all the way around.