Reviews

David Coller
Album: Blue Water
Label: Upstart Yankee
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.davidcoller.com/

Having not made an album in three decades, Coller's clearly making up for lost time, this, variously featuring fiddle, accordion, pedal steel and hammered dulcimer, being his second this year. Whereas that had a loose seasons theme, this, again of a 60s folk persuasion, is firmly waterbound, opening, Diane Chodkowski on harmonies, with the unaccompanied 'Nova Scotia Bound', the lyrics reflecting on the fog and rain enveloping the Gulf of Maine and him heading to Halifax to meet Diane.

Nova Scotia and boats are generally associated with whaling and while that's not the subject there it is on the shanty-styled 'Captain, My Captain' ("many's the great whale who lost his life/At the hands of our brave harpooneers") that draws its narrative influences from Moby Dick as he sings "at last gave our captain that fearful command/"There's one whale more ere we make for dry land", their white quarry taking ship and crew down with it.

At just over six-minutes, the Stan Rogers-like fingerpicked 'Just Another Day', found in Maarten Troost's delightfully titled travelogue 'Sex Lives of Cannibals', is the true story of seven-year-old girl from the island nation of Kiribati in the South Pacific who found herself swept out to sea while playing with her friends, euphoric at the beauty of the sky and stars as she awaited death before being rescued and returning home to her family gathered in the church to let her go, and how the experience changed her life

With a circling fingerpicked pattern and accordion, 'Sally Anne', the title the name of both boat and daughter, is sung from the perspective of an oyster catcher recalling how the industry all but slipped way but recovered to thrive again.

Reprised from the previous album, the jaunty 'We're Sinkin'' relates to an experience with his gaff-rigged schooner Renegade, continuing the new material with' the Texicali-flavoured swayalong 'Love On A Lee Shore' which, referencing the nautical term for being downwind, is about how it's hard to maintain a relationship when one's tied to the land and the other the call of the sea and a mackerel sky ("It was love on a lee shore and taking its toll/If you've lingered too long there you'll wind up on the shoal/You can make fast your hatches and just hunker down/But if that is your best plan you'd best be ready to drown"), ending with the inevitable ("He called from Australia to ask for her hand/But he knew what was coming by the chill in his bones/And the rain started falling when she hung up the phone")..

Back aboard Renegade, the acapella 'The Rigger's Apprentice' with its handclaps rhythm and multi-voiced traditional chorus , relates to replacing the rigging, a task involving "a whole lot of puncture wounds and a thorough review of Anglo Saxon vocabulary".

Another with Stan Rogers undertones along with perhaps hints of Roger Whittaker and Glen Campbell, using the sea as a metaphor the jaunty lolloping 'Let Your Love Roll Easy' was written in anticipation of his granddaughter's first big heartbreak, albeit she was only two at the time, offering the wisdom that "the highest mountain/Is just a pile of sand/And everything that you need is/In the palm of your hand/Look at that ocean with the sky all around/Always in motion, but a few feet down/You'll find still waters, calm and deep and wide/Your heart is an ocean if you'll just look inside".

Sparkling with dulcimer, 'Diggin' For Clams' is about just that ("walkin' by the water where the sea meets the sand/Every mother's child with a bucket in her hand"), a jolly number initially written as a children's song but with the title serving as a metaphor for finding your own heaven on earth, be that a place or a person ("My father used to tell my about Fiddler's Green/And a little town in Iowa that I have never seen/We've all got our own conceptions of what paradise might be").

It ends with the only non-original, 'Roseanna', a familiar acapella net-hauling melancholic shanty from Chesapeake Bay with its crowd swayer goodbye refrain and his personal favourite, learned as a schoolboy from 'Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew' itself discovered in all places from a note on the sleeve of Don McLean's 'Tapestry'. Weigh anchor and set sail.

Mike Davies

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