Ken Stringfellow – Touched

I should probably tell you how the Posies’ Frosting On The Beater nursed me through a particularly bad breakup, but that’s private and you don’t need to know. Suffice to say anything Ken Stringfellow does is likely to have a special place in my heart, and Touched bends over backward to earn every inch of my love.

Before I start sounding like David Coverdale, I just want to say that this achingly gorgeous record makes you realize exactly why the Posies were so special. At a time when the dirgy, flannel-shirted sea of grunge lapped at the shores of our collective consciousness, they burned and shone like a glittering pop lighthouse.

Touched glows twice as bright from the get-go with the wonderful peddle-steel-tinged “Down Like Me” and the melancholy “Find Yourself Alone”. But it’s not until “Reveal Love” that Stringfellow plays his ace; the album’s centerpiece, it’s easily the best thing he’s ever written. Its swirling Hammond organ mingling with Stringfellow’s sad, breathless falsetto, it tells the tale of being in a relationship on the downslide, powerless to stop it and unable to walk away. When he sings, “I wanted you/In truth I want you still”, if you’re not blubbing like a baby, then you’re dead already.

“Are you there/Are you listening…/’Cause the best part’s yet to come”, he says on “The Lover’s Hymn”. Still here Ken, still listening. Keep it coming.