New Brunswick born Matt Andersen has a voice that can fill up the whole of outdoors proclaiming victory or whisper gently in your ear pleading forgiveness. His eighth album, Weightless, is a cross-genre masterpiece that presents a dozen tracks in Andersen’s easy narrative songwriting style, supported by superbly arranged instrumentation that fills each one with hidden gems which reveal themselves upon multiple listens. Producer Steve Berlin wisely chose to surround Andersen and his guitar with soaring pedal steel, moaning Hammond B, fluid piano, the amazing Fantasma Horns from Austin Texas and a dynamic rhythm section capable of blues, roots, swing, country and straight rock.
As Springsteen wrote about New Jersey and Bob Seger the Midwest and Jackson Brown of Northern California, Anderson writes of working class Canada, filling each song with color and characters from its vast landscape. The opening track, “I Lost My Way,” is a traveling man’s hymn that finds Anderson with guitar as he says, “Walking Down Main Street in somebody’s town,” a place many a musician has found themselves and where they love to be. The easy rolling “My Last Day,” reflects on the simple gifts we are each given in this life that often go unnoticed. The gentle country shuffle under “So Easy,” offsets the stern message Anderson delivers about the value of love. The title track is a joyride with the Fantasma Horns bringing the muscle shoals sound into the groove as Anderson attempts to describe how it feels when you find something you truly love.
The chorus says it clearly: “Alberta Gold” is a story we all know and has been told around campfires for generations yet never gets old in the telling. The delicate ballad “Let’s Go To Bed” begins as gentle plea to a lover and builds to a powerful embrace and comfort of a bedroom confidante. On the edgy rocker “The Fight,” Andersen spells out a scene to be found anywhere in the developing world with “Trouble in the water and poison in the ground,” calling us all to arms and rise up against the destruction of our planet. He channels Sam Cooke during the gospel-infused “Drift Away,” then mixes bluegrass with island music flair on the rollicking “Let You Down.” Then “City of Dreams,” offers another iconic working man’s lament over top a spicy Tulsa shuffle from drummer Geoff Arsenault, while the brooding “Between The Lines” offers sage advice to a woman who has suffered and deserves much better.
The album ends with a foot stomping challenge to all as Andersen uses clever thought provoking literary devices to ask the immortal question “What Will You Leave here when you go?” It’s a sentiment many of us should take note and ponder.
originally published at Innocent Words Apil 30th 2014
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Rick J Bowen
