ALBUM REVIEW: Boy Golden Reports Honestly From the Bright Side on ‘For Eden’

Boy Golden makes weightless music in heavy times.

Boy Golden (photo by Calm Elliott-Armstrong)

“Untitled,” the closing track of his new album, For Eden, documents the weightlessness of youth: of drinking in the same three bars, serving drinks for a living, playing local shows, looking forward into the great expanse of future. Boy Golden — aka Canadian songwriter Liam Duncan — alternates between poppy melodies and chipper chatter in this song. Still, “Untitled” seems to acknowledge that the future awaiting the young is one of spinning wheels, of dreams that can no longer really come true. Again: heavy times.

“Made a little money selling my record / I couldn’t tell you where it all went,” Duncan sings. “I bought a guitar / I think it sounds better / but it sure ain’t paying my rent.”

For Eden is an autobiographical slice of the independent musician life, told from the perspective of one who finds the bright side without ignoring its shadow. The album bounces along, its 10 tracks rich with banjo, acoustic guitar, hand claps, drum machines, and effected vocals. Duncan sees that the deck is stacked against the young, yet these songs are about keeping relaxed and positive anyway. Some lines — “Music before language / love before profits / I’ll take my wide-eyed optimism / in the face of all of it” — could double as mantras.

If the world is on fire, this is a solid approach to the summer album.

“Boy, let’s pay off all your debts and skip town,” Duncan sings sweetly in “Boy.” The song is as small as the inside of a van speeding down a familiar highway, the world and its problems still outside, still intractable. “With the windows open wide and the tape deck playing / trying not to think about our whole lives, I’m just saying / take me in your arms.”

Duncan’s 1995 Toyota van — which gets its own song, of course — appears regularly throughout For Eden, and even on its cover art. The shambling, stripped psychedelic folk of this record is like the interior of a tour van that’s almost 30: comfortable, broken-in, and cobbled together from a mix of new and vintage parts.

“I remember getting way too high / on the streets of Amsterdam / looking for the answers, and / maybe we were finding them,” Duncan sings lightly on “The Way.” “That’s just the way I am / but maybe I’ll change / everything else does / so why not me?” Perhaps that ability to let go of preconceptions — even about oneself — is key to Boy Golden’s optimism.

Boy Golden’s For Eden is out July 19 on Six Shooter Records.