Alan Doyle – Welcome Home
This is former founding member Alan Doyle of the band Great Big Sea. While his musical approach is somewhat in that same tradition Doyle’s warm vocals & energetic presentation are worthy of that incarnation. Rich melodies & smart words with a certain Gordon Lightfoot quality to the solo work. Alan blends his balladry with purity, poignancy & creative storytelling familiar to the Canadian style. Along with that, he adds vivid words & distinctive arrangements. All are expressed in a suave manner. Impressive & Alan Doyle is all that.
“Welcome Home,” is an upbeat tune with flecks of fiddle with a rural sensibility ala The Band. There’s a delicacy throughout, with well-chosen lyrics that while not deep or prophetic are easily relatable & applied as stitches in a quilt of musicality.
While Doyle’s voice isn’t penetrating, he does have a generous amount of vocal warmth that made careers for Tim Hardin, Gordon Lightfoot, Pierce Turner, Alan Hull & Australia’s Gary Shearston. Songs like “You’ll Still Be With Me,” “How Did We Get From Saying I Love You” & “Best I Never Had,” show a heightened quality of creativity to Alan’s songwriting — a beautifully woven skill.
Produced in Montreal by Marcus Paquin (percussion/vocals) the 9-tunes on Welcome Home (Drops Feb 9–Warner Music Canada/Skinner’s Hill Music/34:00) arrive as simple balladry, pull jaunty tunefulness from Celtic measures for masterful tunes like “Dancing Like We Did Last Night,” that’s foot-stomping, ass-wiggling & danceable in a Pogues, Oyster Band & Saw Doctors tradition. Beautiful stuff.
Alan has gutsiness that runs through his compositions. You hear it. What I find & appreciate most about artists like Alan Doyle is that they somehow write songs that aren’t written, covered, or considered in America. “Hard Old Hands,” is both an intense folk song & an expressive country tune. Words that are carefully chosen, marvelously sung with just the right touches of intonation, timbre & phrasing.
There’s no fuel-injected tune like Great Big Sea’s cover of the Oyster Band’s “When I’m Up, I Can’t Get Down,” which they took into the Canadian top 10 — but each Alan Doyle solo tune here makes this set equally stimulating.
Songwriting is a craft – but it’s worthless if it can’t be properly expressed vocally. Alan Doyle is superb. And you can take that to the bank.
Highlights – “Welcome Home,” “You’ll Still Be With Me,” “Dancing Like We Did Last Night,” “Hard Old Hands,” “Long Night,” the intense “How Did We Get From Saying I Love You,” “Best I Never Had” & “All For a Song.”
Musicians – Alan Doyle (guitar/vocals), Cory Tetford (guitars/vocals), Kendel Carson (fiddle/vocals), Kris MacFarlane (drums/percussion/vocals), Shehab Illyas (bass/vocals), Billy Sutton (bodhran/tenor banjo) & Todd Lumley (piano/accordion/keyboards/vocals).
Color image courtesy of Bryan Kremkau. CD @ https://collingwoodmerchco.com/collections/alan-doyle
