Singer/songwriters are a dime a dozen, but occasionally one emerges with songs so marvelous that they seem to surprise you, and an album that seems to simultaneously define and redefine the idiom.
Tom Flannery is one of those artists, and
Song About a Train, his official debut album is one of those collections; it instantly hailed a fully mature songwriter of substantial gifts. The scope of the material on the album is truly ambitious, putting himself in the shoes of a refugee of the Irish potato famine on the one hand ("Marie's Song") and confronting generational differences in the mosh pit on the other ("Moshing With David Crosby").
Song About a Train maintains a coherent warmth that belies its execution.
Flannery's songwriting, though, is the star of the album. He gets at a broader significance by first approaching the immediate and the personal. His ruminations may initially seem modest, but they ultimately speak equally to complex, epic-sized themes or capture an abstract feeling. He moves from the private to the universal ("Feel Like Comin' Home") and from the overt to the personal ("Steve Earle Blues"), wrapping it all in the melancholic twinge of romance and regret.
Flannery writes about the paradoxical desire to transcend self and the resignation of accepting one's lot. Observations of the minute emotional and personal details are spot-on, often tender but almost always touched by the bittersweet. "Angeline," for instance, a song expressly about blind faith, is so achingly gorgeous that it almost hurts to listen to it. It is the sort of mournful song that is often mistaken for pathos, but is actually optimistic.
Flannery's songwriting is so heartfelt that it often has that sort of effect, playing as wistful even when there is nothing particularly sorrowful about the subject matter. And yet, there is nothing painful about listening to
Song About a Train. The entire record is heartrending and brilliant. ~ Stanton Swihart