Rowan & Friends share new album ‘Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away’
The York band share their new album.
★★★★★
Photo: Lloyd Bolton
“You wrote that song a long time back and you will never get that feeling back.”
Listening to the new Rowan & Friends album, Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away, has me thinking. Listening to it feels like more than just listening to a collection of songs. It feels like an opportunity. As the lead single You Will Never Get That Feeling Back recounts, we are all chasing something and we are all stuck in the constant feedback loop of life. The infinite zest and restless spirit of this album feels like an invitation to confront what makes us feel powerless and to unbind ourselves from the shackles of our past. As Rowan & Friends say, we may never be able to get any of those feelings back. However, do we really need them anymore anyway?
Whilst Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away may encourage us to look inwards and move forwards, it doesn’t forget what is most important. The songs. This record is all about the songs. They simply sound alive. They are songs that are so full of endless character and personality that each spin feels like being greeted by an old friend.
Album opener Poker Night, coming in at a mere ninety seconds, is an impossibly short coming-of-age tale that sets the album right into motion. When it concludes that “now, I breathe out a lot, but I hardly ever breathe in”, you don’t just understand it. You feel it.
In just one line, Rowan & Friends are able to capture the entire essence of the stresses of daily life and our endless battle to feel like we are living life to its fullest. It collapses perfectly into I’ve Been Thinking About Jesus, another of its lead singles, which is a song that is about as funny as it is existential. Rowan & Friends may be struggling to navigate the many paths we must reconcile in early adulthood, but who ever said that we couldn’t have some fun along the way?
The album takes on the same frantic and chaotic energy seen on the best of the early The Mountain Goats’ records, fuses it with the oddball, dry sophistication of The Magnetic Fields and then sprinkles it with the pure heart and sharp wit of John Prine. No two beats on this record sound the same. It is as diverse as it is energising.
A song like the joyful and celebratory Country Love Song #6 shouldn’t segue so wonderfully into the brooding and haunting David Berman’s Apartment. But it does. It is a testament to the songwriting and narrative thread on this record that these songs fit together so nicely to paint a whole, complete picture. The entire record was mostly produced live. Boy, can you hear it. The performances sound so alive that it feels like they are existing right now, in this very moment, rather than being a mere recreation of a previous moment in time. Every part of this record keeps coming back to the same theme: taking control of your life and pushing forward with what you have.
Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away is about the lives we lead and the people we choose to lead them with. It is as much a celebration as it is a memorial. It is about the lives we decide not to live as equally as the paths that we end up choosing to venture down. In the end, I think Rowan & Friends are right: “Oh, what a life, babe. What a long and stupid life.”
Go On! Roll That Old Boulder Away is out now.
