Seven years have passed since Nashville based power pop singer singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Brendan Benson released his last solo outing You Were Right back in 2013. The part-time Jack White collaborator and fellow Raconteur, Benson spent the better part of two years laboring over his seventh and most recent solo album Dear Life. In explaining the delay Benson told Apple Music,
“I recorded a few songs in my studio in Nashville, and then I got word that they were destroying the building. They were going to tear it down and build a parking lot so I had to move my studio into storage and that was it. I set up a little rig in my house and I started recording a few more songs.”
The resulting 11 new tracks are jam packed into 32 scintillating minutes of pithy on the mark power pop. Fellow ex-pat turned Nashville cat Robyn Hitchcock recently turned to social media to espouse the virtues of Benson’s latest endeavor,
“Brendan Benson has a wonderful new LP “Dear Life” to which I have been grooving this broody Sunday afternoon in Nashville. It’s an astounding lexicon of pop styles that reaches from The Beatles to 2020 in feel and sound, focused by Brendan’s embattled Scorpio psyche into the kind of vital, urgent music that keeps me alive. I can’t recommend Brendan highly enough as a writer, performer (and there’s some ace guitar on this record) and producer of smart, wired pop music. “Dear Life” is available on Third Man Records – and my copy is in pink vinyl. Love on ya, BB!”
We here at SOTDC concur. Completely.
8/10
2020 Song Of The Day Club
Bi-Weekly Record Review 4/26