Lance Cowan

centered thematically on love, in disparate forms, from the gently fingerpicked album opener titled, yes, “Love,” and graced by a warm, understated vocal simply cataloguing the singer’s efforts at discovering “the simple truth” of a fulfilled life, to the high-stepping, fiddle-fired album closer, “Home With You,” a brisk but winsome portrait of a wandering fellow missing what counts: “Last week it was Chicago, next week it’s Baton Rouge/it seems I have seen this whole country/when all I wanted to see was you.”

But the overriding metaphor informing all else—air–is in the title track, tenderly fingerpicked with evocative, minimalist piano and percussion support. Here, “air” is celebrated explicitly as the lifeforce—“the air that you breathe”–animating this narrative as it does all the exquisitely crafted sketches herein; air, without which, metaphorically, it is vital to love, indeed, as in fact, without which there is no life. Cowan’s characters all live with heightened awareness of fragile existence. Which is to say, the dramatis personae, even the doomed Old West lawman Marshall “William Cooper Smith,” are reacting to dynamic circumstances challenging their experiences of love, or lack thereof, culminating in profound revelations of its power, destructive, poignant, and elevating, poetically probed in all dimensions by a master storyteller. Yea, verily, it’s all very Lightfoot-ish, these granular examinations of lovers and tyrants coming to grips with life in full. It’s easy to imagine Lance Cowan one day presenting us with a gut-punch every bit as poignant and positively searing as Gordo’s “Did She Mention My Name.” You read it here first. 

–David McGee