DANNY WIDDICOMBE – ONE NOTE AT A TIME: REVIEW
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
DANNY WIDDICOMBE
One Note At A Time ( Futurfonic Records)
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THERE’S BEEN A DELAY in responding to this album on my part, but I’m pretty sure Danny Widdicombe will be relaxed about my tardiness, for three reasons.
Working backwards, number three is that one of the key players here in the band being called The Wand'rin’ Stars, is a local country legend in pedal steel player Michel Rose, a Mauritian – yes, one of us. And I can confirm that as well as our parents loving old school countrypolitan for party singalongs, Mauritians have a pretty chilled attitude to the whole concept of lateness, on the tropical island basis that rushing in the heat is stupid, and if something’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen, and if it isn’t, then it isn’t, so why worry, have another rum. Queenslander Widdicombe would get that.
(This is an attitude which has its attractions but its limitations too, as I can attest. Back in the day I had to tell some relatives coming to my wedding from distant parts of our native western Sydney that we were not going to have a late-arriving bride, we were starting pretty much on time in this Avalon park, and the non-religious ceremony was going to be way shorter than the usual church ones, so please please, please don’t be late or you will miss it. They were late.)
Reason two is that this is a record which exists separate from mere time. It could be from 1970, 1950, 2010, 1930, or any time people sat in a room with analogue machinery, a puff of the herbal or sip of the malt, and no one even glancing up at the clock because, well, no one bothered putting one up. The eight tracks were recorded in one day, the record is over in a mere 33 & 1/3 minutes, and now that it’s digital you don’t even have to get up to turn it over – beautiful one day, perfect the next.
And the most important reason Widdicombe will be relaxed? Because his singing, the playing, his songs, and the whole tone of One Note At A Time is so relaxed it would not surprise me to hear that it was made stretched out on a banana lounge, under a weeping lily pily. With time to mull up one more time before heading home, one note at a time.
Unashamedly taking his cues from the master of timelessness, Willie Nelson, Widdicombe brings the tempo to somewhere between lightly foot-tapping (Money Won’t Buy You Time) to dreamy (Blue Sky Lullaby) and feels no need to extend at either end. His acoustic guitar dances across Suzy’s Red Guitar but the footfall would barely register on floorboards, Rose’s pedal steel breathes out on Postcard For Michael and Luke Moller’s fiddle then strolls in on the intake, and Cabin Fever has that friendly wooziness of the lightly buzzed day drinker taking a few steps out, with Gus Fenwick’s bass holding up the unsteady and Doug Gallacher’s drums pointing the way back to the stool.
The prettiness of Brendan St Ledger’s piano opens the album on Blue Sky Lullaby with what might be the dictionary definition of tinkling. But if that sounds like it might merely be dabbling, the delicacy of it even as the sound firms up around it says otherwise. Over this Widdicombe does his best Willie-on-Stardust impression: languid but precise, vulnerable but holding control, an echo of some 1930s movie soundtrack.
If the title track has more of a shuffle and weeping pedal than celluloid musicals offered, Widdicombe still brings that blend of early evening honky tonk and late evening piano bar that has allowed Nelson to sing anything. And the Queenslander really seals that comparison with the Texan in the closer, See What Tomorrow Brings, with the way he elongates some phrases, leans into the double bass tone, and then holds us just close enough to feel.
And what will tomorrow bring? Why are you in a hurry to find out? Danny Widdicombe isn’t.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Danny Widdicombe – One Note At A Time