Sean Devine Paradise Valley Sessions
There are some songwriters whose albums are so personal and honest that when you hear their latest work it’s like catching up with an old friend. Sean Devine’s seventh album, Paradise Valley Sessions, has that feeling from the first note — except this time, the catching up happened live, in one room, with no rehearsal to soften it.
Sean cut the record at his home in Paradise Valley, the stretch of Yellowstone River country that’s drawn writers, painters and musicians for a century. No demos, no charts, no second takes. He’d tune up with the band, play a song through once, and the tape would roll. What’s on the record is, in most cases, the first time these musicians had ever heard these songs.
The room he assembled for it was a serious one: Eric Heywood, whose pedal steel work with Son Volt helped define a whole strain of alt-country, on steel; Cary Morin, the Crow tribal member and fingerstyle guitarist who’s played the Kennedy Center and the Paris Jazz Festival, on guitar; longtime Montana Rose bandleader Kenny Williams on upright bass; and Bozeman bluegrass stalwart Jon DeGroot on mandolin. That’s most audible on “She Do” and “Laughing in My Beer,” where Devine and Heywood work almost as a duet — voice and pedal steel trading the weight of the song back and forth rather than one simply accompanying the other. Sean says “She Do” carries a little of Devine’s old Terry Allen fixation, too — he’s been chasing that Lubbock, Texas dust-and-heartbreak feeling since a friend handed him an unlabeled cassette back in the mid-’90s.
But when it comes to a Sean Devine record, it’s all about the lyrics. He’s unapologetically autobiographical, and he’s gone through it — which means listeners who know him well can find these songs land pretty hard. It puts him in the company of songwriters’ songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, writers whose work was never separate from the lives that produced it. Sean doesn’t get up on a soap box about it, though. He’s a storyteller first, and these songs stay inside the story.
Lead single “Happy” gives you a taste of that. Devine has said the song traces back to something an old friend, Shane Baukol, used to say when a job went sideways: “Well, what are you going to do? Enjoy the day.” That’s the whole philosophy, distilled. Happiness, in Sean’’s telling, isn’t a circumstance — it’s a choice, or at least a matter of perspective, and your time is going by either way. “If you want to make God laugh, tell her all your plans.” Simple, yet profound, which is what Sean does best, like this line…which could also serve as the record’s thesis: “The only thing to lose is time. When you get the blues you’re dying…just the same as when you’re happy.”
“Little Bunny” really cuts to the core. It’s the toughest song on the record to write about, and by Sean’s own account, the toughest one he’s ever written. He’s spoken about losing a child years ago, and about an earlier, more direct song on the subject that he says he’s still never been able to sing in public. “Little Bunny” came later, dressed up enough as a story about someone else that he could finally get through it — except it wasn’t about someone else. It’s the quietest kind of bravery, writing a song you can barely stand to sing.
There’s real light on the other side of the record’s hard stretches, too. “I Know How You Feel” comes out of Sean’s second divorce and the drinking that went with it, but it lands as an offered hand rather than a complaint — a song for anyone trying to climb back out of their own hole. “Laughing in My Beer” picks up a similar thread from the other side: a broken-hearted guy who found love again and caught himself holding back from it, afraid of losing it a second time, before he caught himself doing it and — in his words — thought, “that sounds like a country song.” “The Bluebird of Love” adds some self-aware humor to the mix, a song about being a songwriter that his own father (also a songwriter) once warned him against writing. And “The New Mill Road” reaches back to Devine’s years running a home studio, where he recorded folklorist Jim Griffith’s take on a tune that’s floated around the American folk canon in various forms — Griffith, naturally, considered his the definitive version.
I’ve known Sean a long time, and this record feels like him putting himself back home — reflecting wisely, and powerfully, on some hard themes, particularly on “Little Bunny.” When I talked with him about it, he told me that in some ways, he feels like he’s lived his whole life to make this record. Coming from a guy thirty-some years and seven albums into doing this, that’s not a small thing to say.
Paradise Valley Sessions was released Aug. 8 on Tone Farmers, with a limited vinyl edition to follow.
Highlights: “Little Bunny,” “I Know How You Feel”
Find more details here on his website: https://seandevinemusic.com