ALBUM REVIEW: Compassion Is the Compass for Tim Easton’s ‘Find Your Way’

“Think of everyone you hurt, starting with yourself,” sings Tim Easton on his latest album, Find Your Way, his voice expertly seasoned by the nearly three decades of his journeyman career. He repeats the refrain like a call and response: “Everyone you lied to, starting with yourself / Every broken promise, starting with yourself / Every broken heart, starting with yourself.” The song is “Everything You’re Afraid Of,” and it feels like the culmination of a lifetime of learning from your mistakes until you finally reach some kind of revelatory self-acceptance. Even the song’s steady, unflinching pace suggests there is no more time to waste. Let it go and do it soon. Easton certainly has, and Find Your Way is proof positive.

Find Your Way is enlightened, but it doesn’t bludgeon you over the head about it. Instead, it offers a bit of grace for those, like Easton himself, maybe clumsily feeling around in the dark for the door out into the light. These songs are about finding connection over isolation, reaching out when you need it, being there, not only for the ones you love, but also for yourself in the mess of growth.

“Bangin’ Drum (Inside My Mind),” with its bluesy guitar riffs and soft, meditative phrasing, looks to a greater force to quell anxieties. “Find Your Way” thoughtfully recounts a brush with disaster, made hopeful by its golden melody and whispered percussion as Easton sings, “Every day is another chance to find your way.”  On sonically contrasting love songs “What Will it Take?” and “By the End of the Night,” he moves from his lowest, Tom Waits-y grumble to his sweet upper register, both delivering the same impact of true devotion.

As has always been his knack, Easton doesn’t skimp on the details that turn his songs into rich short stories. The lived-in worlds he builds for “Dishwasher’s Blues” and “Little Brother” will let you in with open arms, to walk along the shores of Southern California or join two brothers on the run. Easton is ever searching for the character, the scene, the lesson, all along still writing some of his best songs.

Tim Easton’s Find Your Way is out May 17 on Black Mesa Records.