MICHAEL WESTON KING – NOTHING CAN HURT ME ANYMORE: REVIEW
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MICHAEL WESTON KING
Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore (Continental Song City)
YOU COULD, JUST ABOUT, get through this album without crying, though death suffuses, grief can’t be removed and answers aren’t readily available.
It doesn’t smash you over the head demanding you “feel”, it doesn’t make everything solemn, it doesn’t hide the pleasures of an ascending guitar pattern, a group singalong or a soulful sway, a moment of Roy Orbison with Everly Brothers even. And it does say “I’ve stood sentry at the tower of strong for far too long/So let me in/Let the healing begin”.
A Mother’s Pride bustles along like a late ‘70s new wave group (or a close cousin of Costello’s Radio Sweetheart), and The Golden Hour went missing from a ‘90s birth-of-Americana record; the long night of the western sky in Die Of Shame is waiting for a ‘50s western to soundtrack, and Into The West updates that soundtrack to the revisionist mid ‘60s. Meanwhile, Glenn Campbell would have given anything back in the day to sing Just a Girl In The Summertime, especially if A Girl Called Eddy, aka Erin Moran, was available to reprise her backing vocals here.
And if you feel weighed down you can always flick back to track four and take some guidance from A Field Of Our Own, where over a slightly Latin feel in the rhythm and a warm hand to your cheek in the glistening Wurlitzer and guitar, you can take another look at a possible future and sing “In a field of our own we can find grace/A field of our own, some fantastic place/Let’s go tonight leave not a trace”. And you can believe it. Why not?
You could, just about, not lose it during the final track, Sally Sparkles, a song that gently pads into the room, sets itself up beside you with an acoustic, and talks like a friend passing the time with an old tale. “Now I can see her waiting in the wings/A new love story’s what she brings/She’s not seeking any fortune or fame/Sally Sparkles is her name.”
Yeah, you could, just about. But jeez you’d be some hard bastard, and I don’t think I’d want to know you.
Michael Weston King – on solo route from his usual job in the UK soul/country duo My Darling Clementine with his wife, Lou Dalgleish – doesn’t hide the emotional source material here: the death of his granddaughter, Bebe, in the abhorrent stabbings at a Southport dance school in 2024, and to a slightly lesser extent, the equally abhorrent waves of deceit, stupidity, racism and political opportunism that followed. Waves that weren’t just in the UK but rippled through to Australia, you might remember.
The opening The Golden Hour puts those two elements together, setting up that “seersucker summer” where “We bought sneakers in the sales/Put ink onto our bodies/Put varnish on our nails”. Brutality intrudes and he asks “Who carries on as normal/When it does not exist”?, before watching the thugs and suits arrive, “And the tide washed in the trash/And dumped it on the beach”. These chancers appear again in La Bamba In The Rain, wrapped in the union jack, and in Die Of Shame, sporting a press badge, and the anger is palpable.
But anger is sporadic in Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore, pain is constant, loss seemingly endless: “In the summertime he’s waiting/In the summertime he’s waiting too/In the springtime still waiting/I don’t know where he goes.” And this is where the beauty of the album emerges.
The weight in the title track, a dark country song in all but clothing, comes in the slow walking delivery, in the air around the instruments, in the imagery of abandoned shells of buildings and the now-gone voice that can still be heard, and, finally, in the resignation and acceptance. Maybe that weight is eased in A Field Of Our Own but it isn’t until Grow Old With Me, its brassy soul and upward inflection in the vocals, that you begin to believe anything has been lifted from his shoulders.
Presumably a song to Dalgleish (whose own response to their devastating loss will come in her solo album) but at the very least a throw to a future with a past, not just a past without end, Grow Old With Me makes the transition to Just A Girl In The Summertime feel, like Weston King’s voice, smooth. But not so smooth that the ache in A Girl Called Eddy’s echo can be missed on first listen, and certainly not enough for a listener to hide from the flow-on effects of that ache on every subsequent listen.
The final two songs have a similar preparing the ground/immersed in the territory dynamic. Into The West – “Our grief is written on white sheets/Pegged across yards the sun won’t heat” – is a country-noir of harmonica on the wind and hope-free delivery. It is an attitude not just a patch of land referenced when he sings “So let’s leave before it’s too late/Let’s leave before it’s too dark/There’s nothing here for us”. But can he? Could you?
Maybe, just maybe, the answer to that question is a tentative yes when on its heels comes Sally Sparkles. The tone is a bit brighter, the imagery of a young girl flying high on a swing, one “who deserves a crowd”, who “soars like a swallow, sings like a Swift”, touches on the joy in what remains in the memory, exactly what you can hear in Weston King’s James Taylor-singing-Elvis vocals.
But it always at this point in the record that if somehow on this particular listen I’ve stubbornly resisted tears, my resolve dissolves, the flecks of light suddenly striking harder than any previous darkness. Damn it.
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