ALBUM REVIEW: Yarn Channels Live Roots-Rock Energy Into ‘Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive’

Yarn’s latest, Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, opens with grand, sweeping blues rock and an imperative: get off that screen and join the party. The music, the message to “Turn Off the News,” neither are all that radical, but that’s not the point. It feels good — full stop. “Life is short / but it’s sweet if you make it,” sings bandleader Blake Christiana. “Hallelujah / go find your light.” Like a Tedeschi Trucks Band number, there’s an openly rapturous quality to what Yarn is doing here. This was written to be played onstage. The audience is supposed to dance and feel good.

“All we’ve got is right now / tomorrow ain’t certain,” Christiana sings. “So turn off the news / and that poison in your hand.”

Yarn —  like Tedeschi Trucks — is a live band that happens to make studio albums. The cuts on Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, accordingly, are open-ended as a rule, with instrumental breaks and ecstatic outros that can be expanded onstage. Jam fans are drawn to the church-like physicality of that type of live performance, yet it doesn’t always translate to tape. To Yarn’s credit, Born, Blessed is a roots-rock album with a soul and a pulse, a standalone document rather than a placeholder for what happens live.

“I don’t worry about leaving / I don’t worry about losing,” Christiana sings in “Traveling Kind.” “I don’t worry about the good times left behind / I got more to find.” It’s a no-worries road song with Texas honky-tonk and the Grateful Dead in its genome.

Yarn (photo by Bob Adamek)

“Heart So Hard” plays like funk-rock CCR, while Yarn calms down on standout softer numbers “I Want You” and “Nomad Man.”

“You asked me if I would play ‘Free Bird’ / like your daddy used to do,” Christiana sings in “Play Freebird,” a poignant Southern slow-burner co-written with his wife, Mandy Christiana. The joke, of course, is that the band could whip out this song if someone requested “Free Bird” (do people still do that?), but the strength of “Play Freebird” as a song makes it far more memorable than a cheap punchline. The tune intersperses Skynyrd lyrics with the Christiana couple’s tale of family and love. “So many places I wanna see / but not without you by my side,” Christiana sings. “Lord knows I’ve been a changed man / since you came into my life.”

Onstage, sure, these organ swells and harmonies could sound stirring and dynamic. Thing is, they do on the album as well.

Yarn’s Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive is out July 26 via Symphonic Distribution.