Sam Gluck
I May Well Have Already Lost
(Bandcamp)
Crass nepotism? Or a misguided experiment? I don't know, I just work here. Either way, I've decided to take on the challenge of reviewing the debut album by my beloved son, Sam. Released in April, 2023, I May Well Have Already Lost brought together a brace of songs written over some years, and despite being recorded somewhat too clinically, albeit expertly, by an engineer of great skill but little connection with the material, it is a moving and very honest musical documentation of a growing talent. For the purposes of this review I'll focus on three of its nine tracks, all of which are worthy of note but full expositions on which would no doubt tax your indulgence.
Needless to say, Sam's talent is a source of rejoicing and humility to me, not least because his singing voice is so superior to my own, and his songwriting sensibilities - though influenced by the music I played ceaselessly around him when he was growing up, notably Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and other masters of the craft, and given his awareness of my own uneven canon - are very much his own.
I May Well Have Already Lost I can, perhaps strangely, review with some objectivity. The album opens with its title track, at almost seven minutes an uncompromising statement of intent. One of the great strengths of the album is its simplicity, and its opener exhibits an immediacy and transparency that is deeply affecting. With only voice and guitar, Sam draws you into his inner world, using poetic, poignant imagery recalling Dylan's literally and figuratively romantic inclinations.
For me, the centrepiece of the album is Tonight, a profoundly moving piece augmented with subtle micro-orchestration. Plaintive, piercing, an account of lost love, the song tangibly clings to hope of continuation. Boasting some beautiful evocations of the landscapes of the south Wales Gower Peninsula, where Sam has grown up, with its remarkable natural beauty, space and sea air - "The wind is gentle tonight, out here on the beach in the Gower" - as it unwinds this song arcs from soulful retrospection into an aching elegy worthy of a deep love. Listening to it, as the artist's father, is a moving experience, and unapologetically a source of abundant paternal pride: it's beautiful, and in a way that for me words cannot really do justice here because to do so would require so much context.
Love Will Take You Places You Ain't Never Been is, if anything, this album's Idiot Wind, an astringent and occasionally saturnine observation on a relationship rapidly decaying. It's lyrics bristling but balanced between bitterness and regret, the song - including some magical turn-on-a-dime twists such as "Love will take you places you never been, take you to London, to Highgate Cemetery...take you to Rome, to see the Sistine Chapel" - the spirit of it all is so somehow conflicted as to be paralysing in its straightforwardness and implicit confusion and sadness.
The album finishes on I Once Had a Love, which possesses a universality in its observations on the nature of romantic love, resolving in a very personal open question posed as an answer - "and I never seem to anticipate falling in love" - bringing to a close an album that is boldly confessional and unswervingly void of self-indulgence or self-pity, as much a diary as anything else, but a diary couched in superb melodies and lyrics delivered in a plangent, emotional voice and an unsentimental exposition of hard-fought realisations.
In essence, as put so well by his friend (and OL contributor) Cassie Thomas in her capsule overview, I May Have Well Already Lost, "A collection of impassioned, contemplative, and richly lyrical acoustic folk pieces; deeply evocative of the golden era of 60s/70s singer-songwriters." I can't better that description. Hear it.
Essential Information
Sam Gluck's, I May Well Have Already Lost is on Bandcamp, here
