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With a reputation building steadily on the back of his eponymous debut album, a support slot with Martha Wainwright (who guests with her brother Rufus on several tracks here) and a couple of numbers featuring on the soundtrack to Hollywood hit Brokeback Mountain, Teddy Thompson is back with another collection of songs warm enough to thaw out the most frost-bitten of winter hearts.
It’s all pulled off with a little help from his friends – apart from the afore-mentioned Wainwrights, members of The Band make an appearance as do folk legends (or, as Teddy knows them, Mum and Dad) Richard and Linda Thompson – the latter duetting with Teddy on the hidden cover of The Everly Brothers’ ‘Take a Message To Mary’. But it’s Teddy’s gig, and it’s his vocal perfection and lyrical ease that makes this album feel so familiar, so honest and so reassuring.
The centrepiece of the album is what appears to be a suite of three songs that wrestle with the difficulty of breaking up. First up is ‘I Wish It Was Over’, an upbeat slice of American folk typically undercut by a nasty lyrical edge; next is the dense, shuffling title track; and finally we have the porch-by-moonlight blues of ‘Sorry To See Me Go’. But it’s not all fall-outs and heartbreak – ‘I Should Get Up’ and the fuzz pedal-driven ‘Altered State’ hint at feelings of depression and discontent (‘I like to live in an altered state/It makes me love all the things I hate’ sings Thompson: words that will ring true to lost souls drinking in the Friday night town centres of the country he was born), while ‘Shine So Bright’ and the electric folk of ‘You Made It’ unleash both barrel loads at fame and its accompanying costs (‘I wanna be death bed thin/Never realise the state I’m in/I wanna shine so bright, it hurts’, Thompson sings over the most brittle of keyboard backings). Unfussy yet poetic, understated yet utterly moving; we are in the presence of a subtle magic.
For those familiar with Thompson’s oeuvre, this album won’t spring any unpleasant surprises – which in some eyes could be perceived as the album’s one failure. In truth, folk as a genre has never been about challenging sonic boundaries, but ‘Separate Ways’ does see Thompson moving out of the shadows of his family and friends, with a mature mastery of his craft manifesting itself in these twelve simple, bittersweet songs. But don’t listen too closely to what he tells us – to go our separate ways with Teddy at this stage would be the biggest heartbreak of all.
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