Trapper Schoepp - Siren Songs (2023)

Not only was Siren Songs recorded at Johnny Cash’s Cash Cabin in Hendersonville (where they used his 1930s Martin and June’s Steinway), but the cover has Trapper Schoepp posing by the same pool where Cash would read and dispose of letters sent to him by Dylan. Not surprising then that both artists feed into this collection of traditional American and, especially, Irish folk-influenced songs, with Schoepp citing The Chieftains, the Clancy Brothers and Paul Brady as prime inspirations.

Rich in folklore and nautical imagery, played in open D tuning and variously featuring vocals from brother Tanner and Sarah Peasall McGuffrey, Siren Songs opens with the rousing punky folk romp of Cliffs Of Dover on which the punch-the-air chorus proves him to be an unexpected Vera Lynn fan, though the song itself is much more about the PTSD fallout (“you’re lying in bed/With them Baghdad blues”) of the Iran war (“All your thoroughbreds/Left in the stable/And your best ideas/Laid dead on the table/We lost him to their/Dirty little war/I turn off the television/Wonder what the twenty years were for”).

There’s an abrupt shift of musical styles as it gets all swampy blues with Devil’s Kettle, the title a reference to the two-sided waterfall near Grand Marais, Minnesota, about a mile from Lake Superior, where the water – and any objects dropped into it – appears to just disappear, serving here as a metaphor about answering for what we do as the lyric variously mentions Jonah and the whale and Al Capone (who, legend has it, used to dispose of evidence there) and that God isn’t going to help.

Another number that touches on the mysteries of nature – and his nautical (mis)adventures on Lake Michigan, Secrets of the Breeze returns to Celtic-shaded tumbling, chiming Waterboys pastures with beating military drums, Jim Hoke’s tin whistle and a vocal twinge of Dylan while, producer Patrick Sansome on fold-up harmonium organ, Good Graces, is a song about hitting a crossroads and how “We may falter/Or we may rise up”.

His voice takes a softer tone while the drums percolate and putter on The Fool. Its limber melody and tumbling chorus warn about not playing it too cool in matters of the heart, lost love being the core of the strummed, piano-flecked slow march traditional ballad styled Eliza where his tour of the UK moves on from Dover to the flatlands, the Derby hills and Scotland’s Munro mountains (not bad going for a Wisconsin native) as his titular object of affection takes off across the Northern Sea to care for her widowed mother. And speaking of traditional ballads, the piano-backed 7 Mile Fair (an actual fair in Caledonia, Wisconsin), with its Irish undertones, speaks of “Scarlet ribbons/In her hair”, with its reminiscences of a summer tryst as the band and the drums especially, “played on/And on and on and on”.

Having already been mentioned in Devil’s Kettle, Anna Lee returns with her own self-titled fingerpicked, urgent rhythmically tumbling song and may well have been the one he played it too with as he sings, “I took too long to come around/But if you’re still single, I am down/I think that we are meant to be/I still love you, Anna Lee”.

Joseph Cash, who took the album art photography, also lends vocals to the harmonica wailing Diocese, its poppy folk rock contrasting with a lyric about Catholic guilt (“She used to hang a rosary/By a book of poems, she read to me/She blamed herself for bad desire/Forgot the words in Sunday choir”), contrition (“Like Samson in Delilah’s chair/She went and cut off all her hair/Said her Hail Marys and Our Fathers”) and abuse (“She still feels the ruler on her wrist/The smell of incense makes her sick/She left room for the Holy Spirit/Until the day she was taught to fear it”).

Yet another simple but intoxicating melody line carries the Townes Van Zandt-like Silk and Satin, which draws on maritime imagery and reverses the traditional ballads about women dressing as men to join their husband at sea, to spin a tender tale of a cross-dressing Manhattan businessman by day and Brooklyn drag queen by night (“you put on such a show/With your eyeshadow and your silicone/Give em that prima donna”), the first mate finding a captain and, after the weekend “You tie your tie and comb your hair/You wipe that mascara with a napkin/From last night’s run in”.

The harmonica is back in action for the penultimate Queen of the Mist, a number that, built around piano and drums, could have been written by Ben Glover and which tells the story of Annie Edson Taylor, an American schoolteacher who, on her 63rd birthday, October 24, 1901, became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel, though, as the paraphrasing lyrics note, she told the press, “If it was my dying breath, I’d advise no one do/As I’ve done”.

It ends with the terrific piano ballad In Returning, again steeped in nautical imagery and the lure of siren songs, as it concerns not so much the pain of parting (“I gave myself/To the Northern Sea/And left my home/And my family”) as the anxiety in answering the call to go back home, unsure of what might await, “looking out/From the upper deck/With your Saint Christopher/Dangling down my neck”.

It is a consistently, infectiously melodic album that makes you positively want to head for the nearest highway so you can cruise with it pumping out of the car speakers, maybe occasionally taking time to park up and gaze at the stars; its siren call is irresistible.