- Label: 'Think Like A Key Music'
- Genre: 'Folk'
- Release Date: '7.8.26.'- Catalogue No: 'MOD500'
Our Rating:
Overnight bags is the latest album by 1970's soft rock hero John Howard, who has self-produced, arranged and mixed his latest album at La Casita studios in Spain to reflect on his life in music and the times he has lived through. The album was mastered by Prof. Stoned.
The album opens with Chelsea Daze that sound like the late 60's and early 70's in this case, rather than my own 1980's Chelsea Daze, they are drinking tea in Markham Square long before a resident started taking pot shots out of his window. This namechecks David Bailey and Barbara Hulanicki et al from when Chelsea was one of the coolest most happening parts of Swinging London, while sounding like it could have been recorded at Sound Techniques, while hanging out with Ossie Clark and getting wonderfully nostalgic for the days when the Rolling Stones were based on Cheyne Walk and Edith Grove.
Songs Of The Old Times is a gentle piano ballad for the passing of youth's beauty, blossoming into a more grizzled maturity, encased in gentle strings. In Pursuit is still chasing the glorious hippy dream of a world full of peace and love, this has a nice melancholic feel, with keyboards that sound like a celeste and beautiful harmonies seeking that never ending world of love, a rather noble aspiration to spend your life in search of love.
Abbey Road, April 1974 tells the tale of the recording of John's best known album Kid In A Big World and all the drama that unfolded in those legendary studios, not quite turning out how he might of hoped, But despite that he will never forget those magical days and the music it produced, all wrapped up in some very George Martin style strings.
A Painter's Gift (In Brushed Imaginings) gently paints its image in pastel shades of bucolic loveliness, gentle beauty being unveiled, you slowly study that Painting you were gifted so many years ago. The strings and Celeste give this a baroque pop feel. Look At Life is snapshots of the things that happen while he sits in a cafe watching the world go by, this takes us back to a world without mobile phones and over abundant technology.
What God Is This? Is a eulogy for all the friends and colleagues lost to the AIDS epidemic, slow sepulchral sounds and carefully sung, full of emotion for the loss that still remains decades later, accompanied by a slow wondrous cello and other strings.
The Room At The Top Of The Stairs and why it scared John so much, takes him back to his childhood and the nightmares of what happened behind that permanently locked door, cocooned in the piano and strings we are left wondering just what happened in that room for his parents to close it forever.
My Father's Prayer is full of reflections on his childhood through sepia tinted memories of days gone by, how he misses his dad still, no matter how much he might not have understood the freedom of choice his son sought, hopefully the forgiveness became mutual, after John took to the life he desired, despite his father's wishes.
Josie, Do You Remember? He asks about that flashback you had at an inconvenient time, drinking jasmine tea and talking about the Tiller girls, did all our families have Tiller Girl stories, he's chasing those fleeting flashbacks to all the things he shared with Josie back when they were young and daft as brushes.
The album closes with the title song Overnight Bags that he has packed for one more trip now the carnival is over, well for me this years Notting hill Carnival was fun but seriously over policed, but John is reflecting on the parting from life of so many friends, so he's locked his feelings in his Overnight Bags signalling the transient state that life really is, a gentle sad reflection, while remembering the great loves he has known.
Find out more at https://www.thinklikeakey.com/release/602051-john-howard-overnight-bags https://kidinabigworld.bandcamp.com/album/overnight-bags https://www.facebook.com/johnhowardsingersongwriter
