Blabber’n’Smoke has an undying regard for Jason McNiff, the Hastings based troubadour who combines his sublime guitar skills with acute song writing, talents which remain in evidence on his ninth release, Everything’s A Song. McNiff is firmly based in that troubadour tradition which includes artists as varied as Bert Jansch, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel and Townes Van Zandt and is as spellbinding whether playing solo or fronting a band arrangement.
Everything’s A Song features McNiff playing guitars and Hammond organ, backed by the album’s producer, Matt Armstrong, on bass and drums with Richard Moore adding some very evocative violin to several of the songs. Much of the album cleaves to a romantic ideal, be it the childhood fantasy of running away with the circus or McNiff reimagining The Thames as akin to Mark Twain’s Mississippi but at its heart is the notion that any experience can be expressed in a song.
The album is bookended by two songs whose titles explicitly refer to this notion. Song Of Everything opens the album with a short frill of acoustic guitar before McNiff delivers a series of short vignettes which are both mysterious and darkly foreboding. The refrain, “This is my song of everything that the heart can take and the soul can sing…turn the page of wonder” finds McNiff as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on the tales. The closing title number (co-written with Gibraltar songwriter Gabriel Moreno) is a more jaunty affair with a full band arrangement (including mid 60s Dylan like organ) with McNiff waxing quite excellently, almost like Orwell at his most bucolic, on the inspirations gathered from nights in the pub, cricket on the lawn and fleeting moments of romance as he sings “In the night you see, a winking melody.”
In between, McNiff is on excellent form on songs such as Run Away With The Circus, a song draped in regret which rivals the work of Richard Thompson, McNiff’s guitar playing the icing on the cake here. My Mississippi flows quite sweetly, a Thames river travelogue delivered with starry eyes, while True Love, Freedom finds Mcniff playing solo, a showcase for his finger picking skills on an unconventional murder ballad. On another murderous note there’s the spritely Chef Song which is enlivened by the fiddle playing of Moore, adding a piratical touch to the song which is a grand salty tale of high seas derring-do, it’s followed by an instrumental, Wedding Dance, a wonderfully realised lop sided waltz with Moore’s fiddle again providing the pivotal colour.
It’s fitting that Mcniff, with his roots in 1960s folk rock and blues, should consider a protest song fit to be included here and so it is as he weighs into a Italian partisan song, Bella Ciao. Originally sung by downtrodden peasants in the 19th Century, it became a rallying call against fascism and his powerful delivery is quite apposite these days while one gets the impression that the late Leonard Cohen would surely approve of it. Appearing midway through the album’s track list, it’s a fulcrum of sorts, pinning Mciff’s belief that there’s a song in everything, including the direst of times. Overall, Everything’s A Song is an album which allows one to consider that McNiff is surely a hidden treasure, ripe for discovery.