Evan Rotella - Last Train Home (2024)

Pithy, thought-provoking urban folk doesn’t get much better than this. There’s something both unexpectedly captivating and hugely impressive about the latest album by up-and-coming Canadian singer-songwriter Evan Rotella. At first glance, ‘Last Train Home’ is a very slight affair, consisting of just seven tracks and 29 minutes long, and Niagara-born Rotella employs an equally minimalist presentation of his compositions, a series of wholesome but not overly adventurous selection of folk melodies. As backup, he uses nothing more than an acoustic guitar with dabs of harmonica here and there, and strictly no instrumental solos whatsoever. You could hardly get a more understated presentation, in fact, which in theory could mean you wouldn’t notice there’s more than enough top-quality material here for an album twice that long.

But in practice, it’s a very different story. For one thing, that reined-back but relentlessly intense approach gives Rotella the opportunity to ensure his lyrics stay front and centre for the listener. For another, it also ensures that his singing style, seemingly auto-set on delivering a full-throated mixture of heartfelt conviction tinged with mournfulness, is key to getting the album across the finish line: and that’s a strategy that works perfectly.

It doesn’t even matter, either, that the central idea on most tracks aren’t groundbreaking on their own account, be it the lonely, self-absorbed traveller-narrator on ‘Last Train Home‘, the love-hate relationship Rotella has with his birthplace on ‘My Home Town’, or the song dedicated to his grandfather, ‘Andy’s Delight’, based around the long-closed cafeteria where the two of them would go and have breakfast after church. But that’s maybe the point, because within those fairly conventional settings, invariably you can count on some intriguing, innovative elements and ideas that quickly and memorably come to the fore.

Take Last Train Home’, say, where the narrator switches from talking about a song that just can’t be completed to observing the downtrodden passengers “on their long, long journey throughout the years” on the next verse, and finally feeling himself getting increasingly abandoned by the rest of the world. But the last line of each verse invariably curls back upwards away from the gloom, towards a chance of escape, or at the very least, some kind of resolution.

“I’ve been writing this lonely song
But the ink just fades and the plots all wrong
But the story don’t seem to end
There’s time on the road to write it again”

Equally, even if the locations of ‘My Hometown’ are now only broken shadows of Rotella’s childhood idyll – the busted swimming pool, the deserted front lawn – some kind of defiant unearthly strength within the place still lingers.

“That house up on Magnolia’s turned into memories
with hung-up pictures of you and me
And they can burn it to the ground
But there’s no way those ghosts will ever leave
My hometown.”

This kind of shifting perspective and changes in attitude over time is something that instantly offers connections with most listeners: after all, most of us have got places in our past we can’t revisit, or better times of our lives that we know won’t be coming back. But in his songs Rotella also creates sharply drawn images and struggles of other characters too, like in ‘Maryanne’, about a seemingly doomed quest for freedom from small-town bigotry, and all the hope, pain, and self-destructive fear that it whips up in its wake.

“Maryanne I love you but you’re killing yourself
Begging for forgiveness but you don’t want help
Your sister ran off with some corporate guy.
She wears a bow in her hair
He wears a jacket and tie.”

“Some girl on the bus giving you the eye
Ma thinks you’re the devil and you don’t know why
You’re going to run away from this town some day
When your teeth falls out and your hair’s all grey.”

Rotella namechecks John Prine at one point in ‘Maryanne’, and there are certainly echoes of Prine’s pointed, often sardonic, songs in Rotella’s deceptively gentle storytelling style and touches of caustic humour. His songs are maybe not as darkly ironic or surreal as some of Prine’s masterpieces can get, but he’s nonetheless also very adept at cutting to the heart of bigger things with wry tales of ordinary folk.

For those (like this reviewer) keen to look out for more Rotella, the good news is the acoustic ‘Last Train Home’ contrasts well next to his only previous offering, the equally excellent but much rockier ‘Happy to Be Here’ album from 2023. (It’s also a whole ten minutes longer!) Meantime, for all it zips past way too fast every time, the ‘Last Train Home’ is not one you want to miss under any circumstances.