Chris Coole - The Old Man and the C Chord (2022)

A celebrated Canadian clawhammer banjo player and member of The Lonesome Ace Stringband, The Old Man and the C Chord is Chris Coole’s third solo album, one that finds him stepping away from his earlier traditional-influenced work in favour of the folk troubadours that first sparked his interest in music. Recorded over a two-year period and inevitably constrained by the pandemic, it’s a collection of duets for one person, the songs of a highly personal nature as he approached 50.

The title is, of course, a punning allusion to Hemingway’s famous novella about obsession and a refusal to give up in the face of life’s struggles, a suitable theme given the circumstances under which the album took shape.

That theme surfaces from the start with the rippling banjo and John Showman’s violin of the gently fingerpicked 60s folksy-sounding Upon the Mystery with its opening lines “My life is small, but it’s not broken/so I leave my grievances unspoken/and try think about all the little things /that make it feel alright” while admitting “some wayward sentimental feeling/can blow right in and leave me reeling/I’ll be damned if I can tell you where it comes from/then where it even goes”. Using the metaphor of a songwriter, it goes on to muse on how the future is never set, as a regular after-show drinking companion tells him, “all those songs you were just singing/all they are is just beginnings/But, the verses and that chorus/that’s no guarantee for what’ll happen in the end”. Ultimately it’s just a case of having to just “lay one foot down in front of the other”.

You’ll hear echoes of several fellow Canadians who were formative influences, Gordon Lightfoot, Terry Jacks and Bruce Cockburn among them, the latter particularly on the circling pastoral fingerpicking and dobro colours of Waiting For The Rain, an observation on smalltown economic decline (“I walked farther down the road/to a part of town where we used to go/just to let the good times roll/back in the day/All the joints were boarded up/They tried to hold on/but I guess they had to give up”), the lost souls that still haunt them (“I passed a man on the street today/he was all alone, but he had a lot to say/I guess he must have lost his way/along the line…seems like I see him everywhere I go these days”) and those who move on in the hope of something better (“the good seeds can’t afford a place to stay/so they just dry up, and blow away/waiting for the rain”).

As the album title suggests, Coole has a playful sense of humour, something amusingly evidenced in I May Not Be Much, But I’m All I Think About, a song that mingles the theme of being an outsider (“It’s hard to dance like nobody’s watching/when everybody’s watching/It’s hard to live and let live/when nobody’s living like me/it’s hard to get inside/when the whole world is bent on keeping you out”) with the sense of pride in being different and self-sufficient (“I must admit, sometimes I can’t/help but be proud that I’ve made it/as a self-made man/I claimed my god-given place in this meritocracy”), albeit veined with a streak of superiority (“no one noticed my selflessness/Just goes to show there ain’t no use in trying to help the lower class”), ending with the wryly ironic “When I die I hope that I am remembered for humility”. There’s also a lovely clarinet solo from John Williams.

With Burke Carrol on pedal steel, the picked folk Make This Day is largely based on a conversation with his grandfather back in his mid-twenties about dealing with waves of depression (“I woke up scared just for being alive/told myself it would be alright/I didn’t believe a word I said/just went back inside my head”), his advice being to get out of bed and get on with it (“when that black cloud gets in my head/that’s when I’ve got to rise and shine and try to make the day a friend of mine”).

A banjo-led folk blues, My Name Is Lie emulates veteran 60s American banjo player Dock Boggs’ Oh Death in giving Lie a voice to comment on the post-truth era (“I started out as sin but now they let me in/they don’t call me a lie any more…There was a time/I used to be a crime/said I was the tongue of the devil/but, I got a hold of truth/ripped it free from proof/until it seemed like I was right there on the level”), blurring perspectives in tandem with his mistress Fear.

There’s just one non-original, his version of Dave Bromberg’s version of Blind Willie McTell’s Delia, changing some of the words and adding two new verses at the end to skew the narrative, returning to self-penned material for the sparkling uptempo Sounds Like the Song of Life on the First Day of Spring which, Andrew Collins on mandolins is, as you might surmise, about rebirth with many emerging from the pandemic strengthened “Because there ain’t no brighter light than a love that survives the darkest night… we did a lot of growing in that ice-cold season when the snow came down and the ground got hard/we kept the fire burning in our backyard”).

Accompanying himself on banjo, Coole makes his contribution to the songs about cars genre with Ode To Champ, a love letter to his 96 Corolla wagon (“one part jalopy and bit of a scamp”) that gasped its last in April 22 in Lansing, Michigan and the journeys they shared, giving the nod to Derek Guan, the mechanic that kept it rolling. It’s not too hard to look beyond the surface to read a deeper being of friendship.

And so arrives the rhythmically scampering Paul Simonesque title track, the only one to feature drums, which, in a nutshell, is a playful song about writing a song and looking for inspiration and the right rhyme (“I’ve been picking this guitar more than I ought a/but you can’t catch a fish unless your line’s in the water/I’m the old man and the C chord/the big fish come to those who wait/but, it’s hard to know if ya got the right bait”).

Gavin Gardiner on mellotron and Wurlitzer, Coole picking a wintery acoustic guitar, it ends then with a return to issues of mental health and creativity (“you’ve got a voice inside that rings with doubt and pride and it wonders where the song comes from”) with Where The Light Begins, drawing on conversations with fellow artists about not wanting to smooth out the rough edges for fear that’s where the magic lies, summed up in the lines “you know there’s no use to curse the night/because it seems like only darkness/that can give that light… So now you’re right back here/looking for the dawn again/where the darkness ends and the light begins”.

I have to admit, I’d not come across Coole before, but he’s also released several duo albums, including a recent tribute to John Hartford with Showman. If you’re in the same boat, then after hearing this terrific collection, you too, will have some catching up to do. If you’re already a fan, you can be assured this will take pride of place in the collection.