Michael Chapman's True North album due in February

UK singer/songwriter Michael Chapman's True North album (produced by Steve Gunn) is out February 8th on Paradise of Bachelors. 

The masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album 50, Michael Chapman’s True North finds the elder statesman of British songwriting and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. This authoritative set of predominantly new, and completely devastating, songs hews to a more intimate sonic signature—more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Recorded in rural West Wales, True North unflinchingly surveys home and horizon, traveling from the Bahamas to Texas to the Leeds of Chapman’s childhood, haunted by the mirages of memory and intimations of mortality. Joining him on this introspective journey is a cast of old friends and new disciples: once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker to Terry Allen to Björk. Check out "It's Too Late" below.



Michael Chapman’s elegiac new record True North, the latest chapter in the long story of one of our greatest living guitar stylists and songwriters, navigates the same treacherous and tenebrous territory of time. The album begins with the gnawing regret of “It’s Too Late,” and every song Chapman sings thereafter directly references the passing of time—its blind ruthlessness, its sweet hazy delights—in noirish language almost mystical in its terseness and precision. (The two transportive, gorgeous instrumentals, one per side, both have appropriately evocative—though decidedly not Northern—pastoral place names for titles: Eleuthera is an island in the Bahamas where Chapman habitually holidays every winter, and Caddo Lake straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana.) This is Chapman at his darkest and most nocturnal, yes, but also his most elegant and subtle, squinting into the black hours with an unseen smile.

“Sometimes no disguise is the best disguise of all,” he sings on the unaccompanied ballad “Vanity & Pride,” offering a lyrical key to unlock the album. By the time True North is out in the world, Chapman will be seventy-eight years old and will have released nearly as many records, a staggering achievement. True North represents the most nakedly personal album of his career, his most authoritative, unguarded, and emotionally devastating statement. His universally celebrated full-band 2017 album 50 flirted with much-deserved triumphalism, offering a retrospective of his illustrious career, revisited in the company of the fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John and a rowdy gang of younger acolytes including Steve Gunn, James Elkington, and Nathan Bowles. (Intergenerational collaboration has been central to Chapman’s periodic reinventions and perennial relevance since the 1960s—he is the only musician ever to have played with Mike Cooper, Mick Ronson, Elton John, Don Nix, Thurston Moore, and Jack Rose.) The distinguished quartet of old friends and new disciples that supports him on True North features old friends and new disciples alike, but the sonic strategy this time is intentionally subtractive rather than additive. Once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker, Elton John to Terry Allen, Felt to Björk to Brian Eno. Cole is the album’s secret weapon, contributing sublime, skyscrapingly sculptural steel leads, weaving in sympathetic warp and weft with Chapman’s and Gunn’s guitars and Smout’s hovering cello.

Throughout the band hews to an intimate, hushed sonic signature that is more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Without a regular rhythm section—Gunn and Chapman provide occasional, austere drums and bass on an ad hoc basis—arrangements drift dreamily, ebbing and flowing, following Chapman’s confiding growl and helical guitar figures wherever they lead. Michael cites the Jimmy Giuffre Trio’s performance, without a rhythm section, in the 1959 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day as “a revelation” and direct influence on True North. The production hearkens back to Chapman’s classic Millstone Grit (1973), as well as recalling Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997); True North shares something of that album’s spectral gloaming, midnight heartache, and sly, self-knowing winks. Integral to the shift in scale and the production decisions were the remoteness and natural beauty of the recording environment. True North was recorded at Mwnci Studios, a residential studio in rural, woodland West Wales. Jimmy Robertson, who has earned nine Mercury Music nominations for his work with the likes of Depeche Mode, Ride, and Arctic Monkeys, engineered and mixed.

Compositionally, True North finds Chapman plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. Compared to 50, these recordings feel narrower in range, less overtly narrative and dynamic and more impressionistic and restrained, but they are correspondingly more piercing and arrow-like in their rending impact, more concerned with an archer’s deadeye aim than pyrotechnics. And Chapman’s aim remains true. Whereas 50 featured two new songs among radical reinterpretations of material from Chapman’s deep catalog, True North includes twice as many new numbers among its quiver of eleven arrows—“It’s Too Late,” “Eleuthera,” the fiery “Bluesman,” and slow-rolling album centerpiece “Truck Song”—confirming the exultant return of Chapman the songwriter. The other songs were selected from various obscure corners of Chapman’s vast catalog (“Youth Is Wasted on the Young” was previously recorded with Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke for a compilation, for example.) In these renderings they receive their definitive treatments, utterly transformed. “After All This Time” and “Full Bottle, Empty Heart,” two of the moving duets with St John, are as weightless and lovely as “Hell to Pay” is alternately brooding and menacing.

True North zooms in and focuses the lens more tightly not just musically, but also visually. The title suggests the geography of memory, evoking the Northern England that is Chapman’s home, ancestral and current. Born and raised in Leeds, for many years he has lived in isolated, ravishing Cumbria, near Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border. The jacket photographs date to 1963, when Chapman was working as a photography instructor at a college in Bolton, Lancashire, after completing his postgraduate degree. During this period he stopped playing music for three years to concentrate on visual art. It’s fitting that these beautiful, ghostly images of a vanished North grace the album artwork, because, more than any other record in his oeuvre, True North surveys home and horizon.

Following the levitating lament “Youth Is Wasted on the Young,” Chapman leaves us with a moment of levity, the solo number “Bon Ton Roolay.” Appropriately, this sole moment of unbounded joy and ragged hangover humor dissolves. It remains unfinished, unseamed and tossed aside with a chuckle. The work of time is never done. Where Chapman says good times, he means years, means life.