Spotlight Album Review: Richard Thompson "Ship to Shore"
In a career that has spanned 57 years, beginning as a teenager in London as a member of the seminal folk-rock group Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson has given us a body of work with sharply drawn lyrics and melodies accented by his distinctive guitar playing. His new CD, Ship to Shore, his 27th solo studio album (and first in six years), offers plenty of those attributes.
Recorded in Woodstock, NY (where he briefly lived), Ship to Shore leans into Thompson’s electric side, employing his longtime band, augmented by his wife Zara Phillips on harmony vocals and David Mansfield on occasional fiddle parts. The album kicks off with “Freeze,” a shuffling rocker with insistent bass and drums that sets a pessimistic, post-pandemic tone (“Another day without a dream/Without a hope, without a scheme/Another day that finds you crawling on your knees”).
There are nothing but bad dreams in the song that follows, “The Fear That Never Leaves You,” apparently the result of PTSD:
Ten Years, Twenty or more
The same monster comes through the door
If I could unsee the things I’ve seen
Comrades all to smithereens
The grim lyrics are offset by a deceptively welcoming minor-key melody, reminiscent of “I Misunderstood.” Thompson has been quoted, “I like the idea of having a seductive surface where the listener gets sucked in by a fairly pleasant melody, but then, there are hidden sharks in the water.”
Dreams also figure in “Trust,” my favorite track on the album with its catchy rhythm and chorus (“Love’s so complicated/Dreams get so frustrated/Romance is overrated/Who do I believe?”). It’s one of several songs, including “The Day That I Gave In” and “What’s Left,” that speak of ambivalent love. Given Thompson’s recent marriage to Phillips, maybe we shouldn’t take his words as strictly autobiographical. A couple tunes go even farther, portraying female characters as harridans. In “Singapore Sadie” he sings:
Singapore Sadie, she leaves them all standing
The envious howl and they sigh
The talismans hang from her wrists and her ankles
To ward off the mischievous eye
Some girls just lay it all there on the table
But she keeps you guessing like Monroe and Grable
Untrustworthy women are also true in the unrequited love of “Turnstile Casanova” and, even more, in “Maybe,” a torrid rocker with a sizzling guitar solo that Elvis Costello might envy:
She’s a disco queen from a golden era
She digs old Bowie and Kate’s her hero
She can be flirty, she can be shirty
Her hands are clean but her mouth is dirty
Credit Thompson with an imagination that’s as creative as his eclectic songwriting style. On “The Old Pack Mule” he uses a Middle Eastern drone with a traditional feel to serve as a metaphor that may be about contemporary violence (“It’s hard times and hungry times, there’s nothing left to eat/I’d stab my neighbour in the back for a little bit of meat”). And on “Life’s a Bloody Show” he spins out a gorgeous melody that takes aim at certain (political?) con men:
Just pretend the gods are smiling/
Even though the debts are piling
Just pretend you’re happy as a moose
Just pretend your sneaky lies
Your nasty little alibis
Somehow all add up to be the truth
The penultimate track asks “What’s left to lose? / Everything I cared about is gone.” A midtempo ballad, it seems like one more note of despair, but as Thompson’s soaring guitar solo builds, along with Phillips’s background vocals, it somehow lifts you up. The album’s finale, “We Roll,” proves that Thompson, at 75 a musical lifer like Tom Rush and Chris Smither, isn’t through with touring:
Must be crazy but I’m doing it again
Suitcase living since I don’t know when
No other way to put the food out on the table
Point me down the road again, I’m willing and able
We thank you all for your love down the years
We hope we brought you some joy and some tears
It’s near the end now and the curtain’s coming down
And we’ll go rolling to another sleepy town
We thank you indeed, Richard, and hope you’ll continue to create at such a high level. “If I don't write, if I don't perform, I get frustrated,” he’s said, “And I feel like I’m not being the human being I should be.” On Ship to Shore he’s steered a steady course past Scylla and Charybdis to the emotional truth of our times.