Cliff Eberhardt – School For Love

Every once in a while, you stumble on a record that’s like a big old easy chair, one that invites you to settle back for a round of good stories and a few confessions. That’s what Cliff Eberhardt’s latest offering does. With Seth Farber on keyboard and accordion as usual, and Farber’s wife Liz Queler once again singing harmony, School For Love has a wonderfully lived-in feeling, its blend of blues, roots and folk tunes — nearly all penned by Eberhardt — warm and welcoming.

Mind you, this album is mostly about love. And that means nonstop push and pull; “one day sunshine and one day rain,” as Eberhardt puts it in “Love Slips Away”. Whatever goes for love goes double for life: “This world is so cruel but this world’s filled with pleasures,” he reminds in “Merry-Go-Sorry”, a song that, with its litany of contradictions, could easily have been the album’s title track.

The one non-original track is the traditional “Clementine”, which Eberhardt recorded not in a studio but in Farber and Queler’s bedroom, presumably because the room’s unadorned acoustics so perfectly suited the song’s rough-hewn lyrics and sentiments. With its own contradictions of tragedy and humor, tenderness and coarseness, the song is, unexpectedly, at one with the album’s overall scheme.