D4

Wilfred Langmaid

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

Barney Bentall: The Inside Passage - True North

Enlarge Photo

submitted photo

Barney Bentall’s new CD is The Inside Passage. It was written during spring and summer 2008.

Barney Bentall has reinvented himself in the last decade. He delivers what is his artistic apex to date in the brand new The Inside Passage.

Bentall enjoyed Canadian fame in the 1980s as sort of a poor man's Bruce Springsteen or Tom Cochrane. He had Canadian hits in 1988 with Something To Live For and the next year with Come Back To Me as the leader of Barney Bentall and the Legendary Hearts.

By 1997, that band had run its course. Bentall largely directed his energies to being a west coast rancher. However, he started back as a folk/roots singer songwriter in the middle of this decade. The lovely album Gift Horse came out in 2007.

The new The Inside Passage is even better. Written during spring and summer 2008, it was then recorded in a two-week span. Bentall was fully on his game in the midst of a tour. He did the sessions with four friends as a core band, aided with occasional cameos by family and friends.

The backdrop is a country-folk-roots hybrid. Bentall sings and plays acoustic guitar, while Daniel Lapp dazzles on fiddle and Johnny Ellis offers electric guitars, mandolin, banjo, pedal steel and keyboards.

Sometimes, the connection to the 4/4 midtempo organic pop of his Legendary Hearts heyday is really clear. Examples include the album-opening Hold My Heart and the somewhat blander On This Beautiful Night. Fiddle and steel enrich the former, while the bonus of the latter is the great work of Lapp on horns.

The country spices - things like Lapp's fiddle and Ellis on mandolin, banjo, and pedal steel - are more pronounced on such songs as the two-step Sending Out A Message, the fiddle-driven Catch That Train, and the love-gone-wrong lament I Never Meant To Make You Cry. It is front and centre in the traditional country of Papa Henry's Boy, which gets a neat added touch by having Bentall's son Dustin, a musician and recording artist in his own right, as one of two cameo vocalists.

All 11 songs benefit from Bentall's biggest growth by far in these last three decades. He is now a brilliant, multi-skilled, multi-layered lyricist. This gives an extra power to clearly autobiographical songs like The Inside Passage, which is a chronicle of his relationship with his now-deceased dad and Face To face, a ¾ timed, violin-sweetened ode to his daughter on her wedding day.

The lyrical skills are displayed with equal effect on less obviously autobiographical pieces. Included in this group are Hold My Heart, Sending Out A Message, and the grooving country roots life declaration Catch That Train.

The lyrical acumen may be most obviously the work of a man who insightfully peers into specific vignettes he has created - not just the work of a man who can examine his own life journey - on the album's penultimate track. She Ran Away is an incredibly dense story within a simple narrative - the like of which would recall the sort of genius we associate with Fred Eaglesmith. The song fully engages the listener at every turn, culminating in his recognizing, "I was serving the fifth day of my sentence" as his private fate as the song ends.

The Inside Passage is, in short, the work of a Canadian music veteran who has become a world-class songwriter and troubadour in his neat return over the past half decade.

Fredericton-based freelance writer Wilfred Langmaid has reviewed albums in The Daily Gleaner since 1981, and is a past judge for both the Junos and the East Coast Music Awards. His column appears each Saturday.