I picture Ian McFeron as someone accustomed to drifting around cities at night watching others have fun and relishing the poetic role as a perpetual outsider.
As a dedicated traveller and live performer, this album was originally conceived as a set of songs about people and places from the past drawn from his wanderings in Barcelona, Belfast, Cape Town and around his home city of Seattle. What it has ended up as is thirteen autobiographical songs with a distinctly lovelorn quality.
One song, The Ballad of Florentino Ariza, reveals a fascination for the main character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love In The Time Of Cholera. This fits in with the impression that McFeron is an incurable romantic who takes perverse pleasure in the pain of unattainable love.
He says that the chorus of Windchime sums up his emotional state of mind when writing the songs for this album: "It's too late to turn back now / There's nowhere left to go / It used to keep me lying awake / But now I feel safe".
The inherent fatalism of such words recognises that by letting go you can find contentment one step removed from a life of constant striving. In this sense, it resembles the sentiments of Watching The Wheels Goes By and John Lennon in his solo years is one of the obvious influences to McFeron's vocal style. There's also quite a bit of David Gray in here too.
Other obvious musical reference points can be gauged from the fact that guitarist and producer Doug Lancio has a longstanding association with Patty Griffin while bassist Billy Mercer and drummer Brad Pemberon have both worked with Ryan Adams.
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The album is McFeron's sixth album in eight years, a prolific output helped by the fact that he doesn't hang around in the studio; Summer Nights was recorded in just ten days in East Nashville.
The mood is downbeat though not particularly bleak. Titles like Hard Since You been Gone and Come See me (Before You Go) establish the perspective of someone all too familiar with the experience of having loved and lost.
Despite this, I Ain't Dead Yet manages to draw optimism from still being in the land of the living even though he muses pessimistically that you "don't feel nothing unless you're feeling down".
The biggest weakness of the record is that it lacks variety, the repetitive themes and laid back rhythms have a mostly soporific effect which the addition of some self deprecating humour or rockier beats might have cured.
Ian McFeron's Website
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