Adam McGrath: Dear Companions (vinyl/CD/download)

Lord knows there are any number of artists these days who will tell us on their album of their isolation during Covid or their recent break-up or how they feel outsiders and so on.

The album as therapy? Songs asking for sympathy?

It is a pleasure – a sad one as you may read – to introduce this extraordinary album by Adam McGrath, the man with the lumberjack physique, the soul of a poet and spirit of a working class socialist.

Best known as the mainman in The Eastern, his songs speak from the heart and soul, tell stories which ring with hard truths and real characters.

Maybe he's a folk singer, maybe he's a roots rocker, maybe he's just unique in the musical landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand.

This first solo album -- full of aching songs and an honest tone which would give Springsteen's Nebraska a nudge off the turntable -- is a rarity: it is purely altruistic because it is to raise funds for the cancer treatment of his his friend Paul Huggins whose modest Rough Peel Records label – out of the now-closed store of the same name in Wellington – released The Eastern (and many other artists;) albums.

The album is available on CD and vinyl and download, but not on streaming as long as his friend requires treatment.

Elsewhere always avoids charity albums and fundraisers because if we find the music wanting and say so the response is usually, “so you want kids to die from cancer, huh?”

This album coming from McGrath meant it would get a fair listen (the Eastern and McGrath have appeared frequently at Elsewhere) and as we listened we made notes on just how emotionally deep and gripping the songs were.

Then we read the accompanying publicity which told us about why the album had been made.

By that time Dear Companions, produced by Lindon Puffin, was well over the line as something we would write about and so we are very comfortable introducing it.

Not having known the background when we listened we heard a universality in the hard-edged and heartfelt lyrics, which now have deeper resonances: On the opener Dog about taking a nervous dog on a ferry then looking back from the landfall, “ I was always smiling, apart from that moment when I turned and faced the cliff and the sea and the mist on the far headland. And I thought of you and the path we took, how I followed you there and you followed me here. Lying all the way. And I wished you home safe and sound”

On Splitter's Woe: “We can make a circle the circle makes a wheel. The whole thing goes on forever that’s the nature of the deal. I have no understanding, understanding's not for me The sun it goes on burning, the wheel is made for turning. Lift my hand above my brow, shade my eyes so I can see like a soldier salute and rise. It’s the dying life for me”.

But there are other farewells here too, an open letter to a former lover on Even When It Isn't: “Did you find another? Was he a better man than me? It wouldn’t be hard to believe, it wouldn’t be hard to see. I tell you though I did my best, even when I did my worst. I guess I’m as equally blessed as I’m forever cursed”.

And the social comment we expect from McGrath on The Great Society: “My dad was a man who spoke with his hands, but the meaning was always clear. But clarity’s now a fleeting thing as he forgets all the things he held dear. He always said, 'Men who wear ties will buy and they will sell you until the day that you die' and the bastards and their budgets and the slashing of such, it gets me all red in the guts. And all them salary boys with their white wine grins tell 'em all to get fucked. There’ll be no great society built on the backs of tax cuts”.

So here is a tough-minded folk-rock album with empathy, guts and a deep soul.

We'd expect nothing less from Adam McGrath – who enjoyed a previous Elsewhere interpretation of an Eastern song which he said we'd got dead wrong – but these days, in a culture full of special pleading or attention-getting, it seems increasingly rare.

A special album on every level imaginable.

You should buy a copy. The vinyl comes with a free download so . . .

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here