Essential Forever - There's A Lot Still To Say About Essential Forever (2021) Hi-Res

Every record store, vintage shop, and estate sale worth its salt has that one crate of obscure records from the 1960s. You know the ones. The jacket with the former owner’s name written in pen, the yellowed sleeve, the platter with only a few serious scratches and gouges. Some people dig in those crates for that rare, legendary print; but others, like Chicago songwriter Alex Heaney, seek out two key words: “greatest hits.” And while Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers, or Buddy Holly would fit the bill, Heaney is just as happy to pull out an essentials LP by an artist he hasn’t heard of. The next logical step in that endless chase for greatest hits came in the form of Heaney’s new project, Essential Forever. The band’s new album, A Lot Still To Say, spins like a pop opera anthology from an undiscovered AM era crooner dug out of the dustiest crate in the shop.

Through Essential Forever, Heaney explores the sepia-tinted radio pop he’d grown obsessed with, dousing romantic hooks in Phil Spector’s wall of sound. More than idolizing a bygone era or honoring particular production, A Lot Still To Say cleverly tinkers with the trademark emotionality. “I wanted to write an album from the perspective of this forgotten crooner, the most prolific artist that no one has ever heard of,” Heaney says. “But at the same time I wanted to skew the hypermasculinity and the hubris of love songs from that era.”

Heaney started up the Essential Forever moniker in 2014 as he moved to Chicago for college, primarily using the project as a base for his home recordings. In the years that followed, he’s enlisted a variety of friends and colleagues to help fill out his bedroom Beach Boys ambitions. A big part of that community comes in his membership of indie rock collective Jungle Green, a band with several overlapping side and solo projects within it. A Lot Still To Say acts as the start of a new chapter after those six years of experimenting, the debut from the tongue-in-cheek crooner Heaney discovered within himself. To make that a reality, Heaney brought in Kevin Basko of Rubber Band Gun to produce and contribute, as well as multi-instrumentalists Johnny Costa (Milk Child), Rias Reed (High Appreciation Society), Emily Moales (Star Moles), Riley Byrne, and Adam Miller (Jungle Green/Gold Star Gold Star).

The album’s opening track and lead single, “Hollywood Royalty”, immediately lays out the album’s DNA. The skyscraping chords, thunderous piano, layered percussion, and tight falsetto harmonies sound pulled from a lost Roy Orbison take. But where the majority of classic radio pop of this style may have relied on masculine love language of objectification and control, Heaney’s winks and croons instead of being locked out of another golden ideal: stardom. “I grew up in the suburbs in Ohio, where Hollywood was this untouchable universe,” he explains. “With this project, I can share both my honest love for the aesthetic while also sending up the immature ideas.”

There’s a theatricality to the record, but that delivery never comes at the expense of Heaney’s talent as a songwriter nor his sincere love for the music. There’s a clear exorcism in his subversion of masculine songwriting, as exemplified on the sublime “Fountain of the Earnest Heart”. The “Please baby” calls of the chorus fit a long line of lovelorn wonder, but there’s a fragility far less performative in the verse: “All the tough I talked to you/ Came before I was renewed/ Baptise me in your lily pond.”

Though written as arch love songs, A Lot Still To Say largely avoids gendered subjects and weaves insecurities and admissions of guilt rather than blame. He’s not the conqueror in “Then I Surrender Willingly”, needs someone to lean on in “Shelter”, while “All We’ve Gotta Do” admits that he wouldn’t be surprised if his love walked away. “I wrote these songs to express love as I feel it, which exists throughout a spectrum of identity and sexuality rather than in binary terms,” Heaney explains. “It feels cathartic to write in the language of love songs, but to expose inherent vulnerabilities and ground it in real thoughtfulness.”

Heaney and his collaborators packed into Kevin Basko’s Historic New Jersey studio to give these songs the collaborative, grand feel they deserve. The shimmering percussion and interweaving shoelace guitar solos “Carry On Grace” come pumped from some dreamy jukebox, while the piano-driven “Walk” hits a psychedelic Beatles sigh. Because ofthat cohesion and complex live musicianship, each track on A Lot Still To Say stands on its own as a pop gem, but it’s Heaney’s modernist take and sterling voice that makes Essential Forever’s latest feel like those beloved greatest hits records: “I wanted to write songs that can help people fall in love a hundred times over.”