The Pine Hearts - Lost Love Songs (2022)

Recorded in rural Oregon, Washington-based Americana roots trio The Pine Hearts featuring Joey Capoccia, mandolinist Derek McSwain and bassist Dean Shakked return with banjo player Lob Strilla fiddler Bevin Foley and Bart Budwig on trumpet for Lost Love Songs, their follow up to 2020’s Back To Sustain. They open proceedings with the jaunty restless hearts bluegrass Mary The Night’s On Fire with its defiant refrain, “I’ll give up, but I won’t give in”. It’s followed by Wouldn’t You Know, which, written at the National Science Foundation, South Pole Station’s greenhouse where Capoccia was working as a carpenter, is another bluegrass tune from whence comes the album’s title (“I’ve been searching for lost love songs/I’ve been sleeping under the stars, wadin’ the rivers with the fallen angels, drinkin’ champagne out of Mason jars”). Things take a more folksy path with the romantic Darlin’ Don’t The Sunlight In Your Eyes and its fiddle and pizzicato banjo notes.

Indeed, love songs, lost or otherwise, are scattered throughout, such as the midtempo bluegrass Losing You and the more sprightly, upbeat toe-tapper Sugarcane. However, written, I’d assume during Capoccia’s stay in Kauai in Hawaii, Ocean In Your Veins, with its hesitant guitar strums opening before unfolding into another fiddle flowing bluegrass breeziness, speaks of taking a break, to experience the restorative power of just lying on your back in the warm water (“Three weeks are almost gone and wave after wave, has finally calmed me down”). On the other hand, it just might be about drowning.

They head off into more melancholy territory with the reflective waltzer Unrequited Days, a song about the loneliness of the road and the call of home (“all day long, I’ve been whispering a prayer, Lord won’t you take me there/When the morning came I woke up hungry for every place I’ve ever been. I was calling out the names…When the road less traveled leads to darkness, I tend to question the way/Though I’ve made up my mind, god I feel stupid sometimes, for the choices I’ve made”).

It’s an introspection that resurfaces on the final track, Unit Of Time, a partly spoken five-minute thirtysomething crisis, musing on the passing of the years, the growth of wisdom with parenthood (“it feels like forever when you’re only halfway through/Back when we were kids, for the most part, we were free/I’d wonder why the adults got so upset and worried/I couldn’t understand what was so important then… I guess the love of your children let’s stress start slipping in”) and of losing the ones you love (“Not that I’m a geezer, Christ I’m only 35/But I’m already starting to wonder how long I can survive/In this world if it’s without you”), waking at night in a cold sweat and trying to get past the ears by “thinking about stupid things…/Like airport parking, oil changes, and organizing my closet”.

A similar dread informs the deceptively sprightly Bones Of The Vineyard, initially painting a picture of the grapes growing under the California sun and producing wine, but veined with the awareness that it takes “nine thousand miles of irrigation pipe” to “keep the crops growing throughout the summer”, without which “this part of the world would be nothing but dust, nothing but desert in the sun”, a sobering metaphor about the precariousness of life.

Elsewhere, Long Gone Crazy offers another love song down the years campfire waltz, the banjo scampering and fiddle flying Running In Place is as energetic as the title suggests while, counted in, the no less frisky Burn That Bridge is about cutting ties and moving on from things that hold you down. Which just leaves a return to the sea for Oceans and Limousines, only this time, burnished by trumpet, the theme is separation rather than soothing (“So the deep blue ocean has come between, like the end of the evening and an old limousine/Looking down below from the hotel balcony, the cars are all pulling away like waves back to the sea/Miles of coastline constantly recede, and put a little more ocean in between you and me”). But while there’s loss and the need to let go and not “Holding on to things that don’t mean a thing/Like you and your lovers can come and go as they please”, the song also evokes the classic romantic image of the sea as a balm for the broken-hearted. While its enduring vastness is a reminder that the tides will come in as well as go out, in the line “You know that the ocean grows continuously, so let it take you away like an old limousine/And if you want to get a little closer to me, take your heart down to the beach and soak it in the sea/You can spend all night wishing on every star you see, but that’s not as close as the ocean is to me”.

Expanding their musical horizons and refining their established newgrass sound while offering thoughtful lyrics that touch on emotions to which we can all relate, these lost love songs are well worth discovering and giving a home.