Danny McGaw’s indelible, new album “Mystery Parade” (December 18th) weds a
particularly Northern English folk sensibility to the banjos, harmonicas, and
rhythms of American bluegrass and blues. There is a vagabond feeling in this, his
15th collection of songs, many of which are bruising meditations on the push and
pull of home; the road – its illusions, traps, and pitfalls; and what happens to the
nature of love and friendship along the journey. He wrenches new perspective on
the seeking life from the fist of experience, and molds it in his own image.
The first thing that impresses itself on you is McGaw’s singular voice, a mighty
Richard Burton-esque baritone, containing, at once, an almost boyish earnestness
with worldly heft and a sense of having seen a thing or two. The voices of many
singers as powerful as his are are riddled with chilly technique resulting in a sort if
cold beauty but he comes by his power naturally and retains a native, unstudied,
and genuine warmth that allows for a far less removed, more intimate sound. The
sheer power of it sometimes has the effect of lending it a strange solitude, as in
tracks like, “I’ll Get Back.” Just as often, though, it sweeps you into a rousing,
heyeverybody-sing-with-me! feeling.
A voice of that strength is grippingly vibrant in live performance, but needs careful
framing on a studio record to keep the balance of the music. McGaw under his own
label, Northern Lad Records, has produced an album that recognizes this and
modulates it accordingly with a high degree of practiced finesse. Although this
demands self-awareness, there is nothing self-conscious about the music. The voice
is often allowed its full, untrammeled range inside the various landscapes of the
songs.

An uncompromising sense of melody is to the fore in all of McGaw’s songs. Try
getting the tune for “Good Woman” or “Ghost in the Attic”
out of your heads after even one listen. Rhythms are strong, often even pounding
and – making the process look deceptively simple – the words seem to slot
perfectly into place within them with a certain amount of enviable inevitability.
It’s difficult to imagine different lyrics to any of these songs because the lyrical
mood cleaves tightly to the musical mood like a pair of clasped hands, imploring,
but singular and strong.
McGaw’s sense of melody seems hot-wired right into the old, deep, fireside part of the brain,
the part that the saga poets and minstrels knew was where melody and rhythm
impress meaning even deeper into the human soul. Into that melody he packs light
and shade, and heart and head.

The vagabond spirit in this album draws from two countries. Having emigrated from
England in his early twenties, McGaw has wandered widely in the US for over a
decade, tapping deeply into the roots of different American musical styles,
particularly in Kansas City and North Carolina. The result is a cross-breeding of
traditions, creating a whole new American hybrid that’s rooted as much now in
American soil as in British. Wound into a modern, bluegrassy sensibility, there are
whispers of English folk music, traces of Nick Drake, rumblings of Irish pub songs,
and something of the stark poetry of Billy Bragg. Each track is delivered with a
propulsive beat and frequently an almost preternaturally catchy melody –
sometimes in quiet meditation, sometimes in a rousing anthemic arc.
McGaw grew up in Manchester, in the North of England a place of brass tacks and
make-do-and-mend, but where the Oxfam-shop dreariness of the 80s was cut
through with bubbling volcanic energy and a deliciously sly working-class wit. As
the late great NME tub-thumper, Steve Wells, once said “Northerness is to
Englishness what unicorns are to horses, what with being further away from France”.
The Mancunian accent is a very distinctive, old, and storied one. If it were
represented by a font, (italicized for speech) it would be an no-nonsense Helvetica,
only with the italics pointing North East, reclining backwards, not forward,
irreverently observing the daft world, and harking back to the days when every
working-class Northern Englishman could be found beneath a flat cap, drinking
over-brewed tea with his evening paper, and having informed opinions on ferret
husbandry. There’s innate wryness in the cadences, and a sort of earthy,
unapologetic starkness, which these days has people all over the world wanting to
sound like Jon Snow of the Nights’ Watch on Game of Thrones. Northerners live
within their accents rather than merely wearing them and, on different levels, that
has implications for many of McGaw’s songs.
The tricky relationship with home is excavated in different ways on several tracks.
The anthemic “I Remember it Well,” feels like an Irish pub song at the misty-eyed end
of the night; people swaying arm-in-arm to a ringing paean of personal and
collective memory; the song closing with the crowd roaring the chorus. But home is
not that simple. “If there’s no-one there (to meet you)” McGaw asks in the song of the
same name “is it still home?” Fittingly, this song of roaming, is the most countrysounding
on the album:“This train is moving, where it’s headed I don’t know.” Two
unaccompanied male voices start the journey, then instruments are gradually
added, building poignantly as the song’s gaze turns from looking backwards to
pressing forward: aimlessness turns into direction, and Northern English roots and
reflection yield to California dreaming and escape. “There is one thing that is certain –
Son, you’d better dream. Pick a direction, trust the road beneath your feet.” Without
being didactic, it feels like the start of a solution.
Home is referenced again in the hypnotic, slightly trippy “I’ll Get Back.” We return
“to that song that doesn’t care who’s listening, to that dream that makes sense of the
day…Back to that road that led us away.”

As much as looking back for meaning is examined in this album, there is also a
correspondingly strong sense of pushing forward to where hope lives and love
endures. The future is looked to in the ambiguously titled “Give and Take”. A
“hundred year-old wall” is left behind, but there is “morning light,” the taste of the
ocean ahead, and the aching, searing, refrain “Oh my love, I’m coming to you.”
In the foot-tapping song of escape, “Let’s Go Get Ice-Cream,” the distraction for a
rueful soul, beaten down and jaded with life and false promise, is returning to
simple pleasures. The song sweeps us up wholesale in a mood we all recognize: we
are weary; we are numbed in a system indifferent to the individuals within it; we
want to get away from “these people who aren’t (y)our friends.” The beat builds and
pitches us forward. We are in it all the way…we want to cut the crap and rediscover
something simple and real! We feel it with the exclamation point because there is
real catharsis in the way the song handles mood. It starts and ends quietly and
ruminatively, building acoustically as we recount how life can beat us down, making
it almost impossible for us not to relish the temporary reprieve from it and join in
the supremely catchy refrain: “Let’s go get ice-cream, let’s go get drunk. Go see a
movie, have some fun! Quit the fighting, move along. Let’s go get ice-cream! Let’s go
get drunk.” It’s the McGaw way of coming up fighting and it makes us want to join in.
This same sense of private resistance against an unbeatable system is pervasive
throughout the whole album, implying the large and small personal evolutions
needed of necessity, just to survive in the world. Again and again throughout the
album – like in the brooding “Heavy Heart” where “the sun is drinking in the
daytime…promises are inevitably broken, and friends are hard to find,” – we intuit
that McGaw, at one time homeless and surviving on busking and odd jobs,
understands something of the unyielding nature of bedrock.
The mawkish self-indulgence that sometimes haunts songs of bottoming out,
however, is avoided, because these songs are also about how to find some way back
up to life; “There’s another way. It doesn’t have to be so cold.” They involve love as
redemption from cynicism, but also contain a species of defiance that taps into the
sense of injustice – even futility – we all feel sometimes when pierced by the
infamous slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Defiance is co-opted as a virtue
and, again, without preachiness of any sort, it feels like a solution.
In songs like “I’m Not Afraid,” McGaw’s leonine voice is the ideal instrument to send
up that defiant cry, soaring and cracking for us all to see, above the static, and the
din, “the ashes,” and “the fighting cage.” “I see right through you! Your twisted game.
As long as I’m loving, I’ll be OK.” The static builds, then the dark noise-scape suddenly
clears. Some wisdom has been hard-won. Californian sun breaks through the
scudding clouds of a Northern sky and, even as we recognize troubles, there is relief
from them. (Perhaps because he’s from Britain, a nation preoccupied with the
weather, the sun and the sky are frequent tropes in McGaw’s work.)
“Pay the Man” is more subtle; it’s a short meditation on the promises of modern life:
the advertising and big business, the system that leave so many trampled in their
wake: “believe in anything…ask no questions…nothing here is free.” The Man is
beguiling; he steals even as he sells things to us. He promises us everything, “Give
your sins to me, I will see that they’re not found,” providing that you “ponder nothing
you see.” The song is a clear-eyed, unsentimental statement of how modern life often
is, but with a further step. With just voice and guitar in a minor key, we intimate an
acceptance of the state of things but then also a pushback against it: this is how
things are, but this is not how I will be. There are strong folk instincts in the song
but it doesn’t call for a violent, bloody revolution against society; rather a quiet,
soul-saving revelation within oneself that might be paraphrased: I will quietly turn
away from all that and walk my own path.
Placed right at the heart of the album is “Ghost in the Attic,” a rousing join-in-withme foot-stomper with an almost tribal beat, which, wholly unexpectedly, yields in
the middle to a heartbreaking plea that that rises and falls, and which you don’t
think is blistering until you can’t forget it for the rest of the day: “Let me go! I need to
go.” Sudden tonal transitions like these are part of what makes McGaw’s music so
affecting. The ghost in the attic feels like the voice that pulls him back, but the strong
forward propulsion of the song and the repeated refrain “It’s not for me” suggests
the uncompromising ghost – “standing arms folded, narrow pointed eyes” – is losing
its pull more and more.

“Mystery Parade”, the final and title song of the album, can’t help but recall Hunter S.
Thompson’s dark quip: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a
long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.
There’s also a negative side.” It envisions life as a strange pageant that you stumble
into by accident, and it brings together many of the album’s thematic threads with
lines like, “I could not go home,” and “the sky was full of rain…the sun faded”; with
references to homeless kids and veterans down and out on the streets; and pimps
and hustlers trying to get you to buy their promises. The track also elaborates on the
theme of our personal responsibility in the world: In the line “I could not look away”
the ambiguous “could” refers not just to being mesmerized by the dazzle, but also
becomes a moral imperative not to look away from the dreariness.
All of these songs achieve what every decent artist aspires to, in teasing the
universal from the specific. But, less formally and more importantly, they make us
feel recognized, and many of them just simply make us feel good for a little while,
which isn’t all that easy a trick to manage with integrity in our cynical times.
McGaw’s unmistakably heartfelt authenticity is the key to this and, in the larger
sense, to his appeal. The restless spirit in the album is honored alongside a
recognition that meaningful change and revolution can only come from within.
With a sensibility as vast and cloud-scudded as a Northern summer sky; with
captivating melody, and a pure clear voice of force and feeling, it turns out that
Northern English pragmatism mixed with California dreamin’ by way of the rhythms
of the American Midwest makes for a rich, distinctive, and powerful brew – be that
brew beer, tea or whisky.