On rare occasions I’ve come across a songwriter who goes beyond
\nthe basic elements of the craft. Instead of melody and rhyme
\npowering their words, they choose to bare their soul and let that
\nenergy envelope the fruits of their labor. The song is simply a
\nvehicle for raw emotions often hidden, fears often unspoken. There
\nis no separation between the song and the artist. What you hear is
\nwho you get. Jeffrey Gaines is such an artist.<\/p>\n
Possessing an achingly soulful voice, Gaines uses it to great
\neffect to share his moments of weakness, his anxieties and
\ninevitable contentions with loss. Listening to his debut album
\nJeffrey Gaines<\/i> is akin to an intimate encounter of the soul.
\nYou are the ear to his confessions, his foibles. Gaines has
\nrevealed his vulnerabilities so that you can look a little deeper
\ninto you own.<\/p>\n
The album opens up with “Hero In Me”, a beautiful, eloquently
\nrendered song in which Gaines realizes the stagnation that can
\nsmother one’s life. But recognizing this he has hope that he can
\novercome it: “Here in my security\/I’ve simply let myself go\/I’ve
\ndeveloped a co-dependency\/And as I grow older\/So many places that
\nI’ve never been\/Time’s tapping my shoulder\/I hope it’s never too
\nlate to begin”. And then there’s “Scares Me More”, which vividly
\nexpresses the fear of living with the consequences of one’s actions
\nor the fear of never deciding at all: “I could hit or I could miss,
\nbut just to sit around like this\/Scares me more than anything in
\nthe world”.<\/p>\n
While these songs wrestle with the inner demons of indecision
\nand inertness, others tackle the feelings of regret. In the very
\npersonal and autobiographical song “Didn’t Want To Be Daddy” Gaines
\nsings about his aborted child. He is older and wiser looking back
\nat a time when he was a rash young man who “didn’t want to be\/The
\none, with all the responsibility\/The one, with children at my
\nfeet\/The one, with the happy family\/’Cause I didn’t want to be
\ndaddy”. It’s not a plea for forgiveness nor a reflection on guilt
\nbut simply an admission of human failure. The quiet and poignant
\n“Sorry The Very Next Day” details the relationship with his
\nalcoholic father. It’s a moving ballad in which we can feel
\ncompassion for them both as victims in the maelstrom of substance
\nabuse.<\/p>\n
Gaines has his reflections on society: the stifling of
\ncreativity in the educational system in the Bowiesque “Headmasters
\nOf Mine” and the senselessness of murder in “Why” where he sings,
\n“How could you think it over\/And still follow through\/Is there no
\none in this world who loves you”. In “Choices” he takes a stance on
\nabortion singing from the point of view of a woman, “Please
\nunderstand that it’s\/My life, my mind and my body\/And leave my
\nchoices alone”.<\/p>\n
\nJeffrey Gaines<\/i> is a brilliant collection songs adorned in
\nsubtle and beautifully wrought arrangements. Each song stands alone
\nembodying its own particular mood and punctuated at the end with a
\nsingle guitar chord or sung word (the only song allowed to fade out
\nis the last cut). This is very effective. The songs take on the
\naspect of short scenes in this drama of being human.<\/p>\n
In the first cut on this album Gaines sings, “There’s got to be
\nsome hero in me”. It takes courage to reveal the short comings
\nwhich most keep hidden. It takes an inordinate amount of courage
\nface down the vulnerability that would result from such and act. So
\nwith that said, there is probably enough hero in Jeffrey Gaines to
\nspare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":25313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6276],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-36519","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-jeffrey-gaines","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36519"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=36519"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=36519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}