Available on-line at:
Eastern Front: http://www.easternfront.com
FolkWeb: http://www.folkweb.com
Not in stores for some weeks yet. Hot off the presses.
Overall Grade: A+.
This album moves Greenway out of the blurry-eyed, cause-oriented,
"we can save the world" albums of the past into a dark
songwriter who engages pain, suffering, anger, and helplessness
- not from the "we shall overcome" viewpoint, but rather from the
"loss is a common fact" theme.
Beginning with "Driving", a song about loosing a loved one to
AIDS, Greenway captures the helplessness and fragility of life, and the
attempted escape by those left behind. "I'm alone behind
this dark windshield, afraid, and there's no driving this pain away."
(Co-written with Susan Werner)
The powerful "Mussolini's Head" takes on a topic that many wish
to forget: the fascism that we see has its roots in our very nature.
With this song, Greenway takes his writing to a completely different
place than that of "Free at Last" or "One Man, One Woman, One Vote".
There is no solution in this song. "They cut off Mussolini's head,
it sprouted roots in the warm spring rain..." - why did it flourish
after we thought we killed it? Greenway examines why - and makes
you examine why. You will engage the ugliness of hate.
"Archaeology" is a beautiful song about love lost. The beginning line,
"The scares of all my failures are buried well beneath my skin"
establishes the vulnerability of the narrator in a search
for closure and healing. Finding solace in new love, the bones
are never far from the surface.
"Survival" examines the painful feeling of being left out.
The chorus "What about me? Do you ever think about me?
What about me? You look right through me - you don't even
know my name" touches on the heartache we have felt when leaving
or being left by someone we love. Rather than providing a
solution to this feeling, Greenway asks you to swim in this
emptyness, and soak up this pain.
Greenway has added a few upbeat, positive songs, such as
"Into the Wild Why Not", "Desire", and "On My Way To Find Out",
which reassure you of the goodness in life, and that we
haven't lost Greenway completely to the dark side. Overall, however,
Greenway wants you to explore the painful and the dark in this
album.
The instrumentation further blurs the line between
acoustic and electric, the line between folk and rock - it is
very precise, developed, acoustically powered, and rhythmically
soulful. The music is characteristically Greenway - every
song has a distinctive, complex arrangement, based on
innovative and creative acoustic guitar work.
Will this album bring you down? I don't think so. But depending
on what is buried beneath *your* skin, it might make you
cry at times.
-Robert Curtis
Robert R. Curtis, Ph.D.
WebPrimitives
P.O. Box 390889
Cambridge, MA 02139
robert@calculus.net
calculus@internet: http://www.calculus.net
TeX2HTML: http://www.tex2html.com
FolkWeb: http://www.folkweb.com