All tagged John Calvin Abney Album Review

John Calvin Abney: Tourist

What do you say when the word goes by through a window? How do you talk about home when the ground always seems to be shifting under your feet? John Calvin Abney answers this throughout the narrative weaved on Tourist. With this album, you get the feeling of going home to the same landscape and piece of nostalgia, but there is also a layer of deja vu or perhaps a sensation of the uncanny valley. Nothing is different, yet somehow nothing is the same. Also an expression of a life lived passing through towns from one stop to the next. Two themes somehow juxtapose to a single sentiment that’s difficult to put into words, unless you're John Calvin Abney, who somehow knows exactly how to do just that.

John Calvin Abney: Familiar Ground

March 2020 will be remembered as the month the music stopped. John Calvin Abney was set to tour with his long-time collaborator, John Moreland, to promote his latest record (LP5) when the pandemic shut everything down. That’s when Abney holed up at his current home in California’s Bay Area to begin writing the songs that would become Familiar Ground. He says, “I had written some of the songs before everything went down but some of the songs really took form as I had this surplus of time and lack of tour so I ended up having a lot of mental space and physical space to delve into writing. I also got to workshop some of these songs and hone their edges.”