Cam Penner may look like an archetype bearded lumberjack from Canada but his background is anything but conventional.
He grew up in Mennonite religious community in a small Manitoba town although his parents were town rebels who ran an illegal roadhouse.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he upped sticks as soon as he could at the age of 18 and his stateside wandering eventually took him to Chicago where he worked in a centre for homeless men.
As a travelling musician with no fixed abode he forged bonds with these men and was sympathetic to their life stories. The diverse tales of hand to mouth existences left him with no shortage of material for the songs he wrote for his first three albums.
Gypsy Summer is his first self produced record and, he says, a much more personalised collection. The eleven tracks were recorded with a group of trusted musician friends at the Cloudy Ridge Ranch in Twin Butte Alberta, Canada.
His promoters says that this is "music born of soil and sin of this world" and there's certainly a raw authenticity to his song writing style. They have that precious quality of sounding like they come from first hand experience rather than using borrowed ideas and emotions
As you might guess from his lifestyle and background, there are no songs about settling in a cosy domestic setting. Instead, there's the restless quality of a born drifter mixed with plenty of reflections about "chasing down our dreams"( Ghost Car) and finding solace in love (Gypsy Woman / Come As You Are).
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There's some lonesome harmonica on Driftwood and Cool Cool Nights but Penner gives the mellow acoustic foundations a more upbeat dimension by incorporating drums, strings and, on Gypsy Woman, a energizing burst of twangy electric guitar.
Alongside reflective songs about troubled times (Hour of Need) and the fragility of life (Flesh & Bone), he cranks things up a gear with funky driving rhythms of My Lover & I and Throw Your Hands Up.
The "It's gonna get worse but it's gonna get better" line of Driftwood neatly sums up his philosophy of an optimistic realist and the end result is a nicely varied collection that stays true to the country-soul roots of his sound whilst also being open to letting the tunes breathe.
Cam Penner's website
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