Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

‘We plead and we pray, for the breaking of day’, Dan Fogelberg emotes in one of this album’s more gripping sagas of angst, existential despair, lost love, and incessant yearning.

It’s the kind of turning a phrase that makes some souls reverberate to Fogelberg’s musical soul exposure and others whince when they hear his name as though it were not well to say the word in polite company. This reviewer is among the reverberators.

Anybody who performs with his heart so stapled to his sleeve is bound to overreach. Fogelberg certainly does (‘Nether Land’). But when he’s on, he takes one back to his college years and the emotional surge that comes from the occasional lyrical trajectory. The experience does not easily subject itself to logical explanation. This is where Fogelberg finds his voice.

Hear this:

Every morning you wake up alone
And you shake up your soul
But nothing stirs
So you take the love of whoever
You please
But you can’t find no reason
For giving yours.

cause, once upon a time
You held a love so strong and fine
That all the others simply don’t compare
She’s always on your mind
But once upon a time
You had her there.

It is the juxtaposition of a lost love ‘strong and fine’ with every morning’s shaking up ‘your soul, but nothing stirs’ that transform this descriptive semi-prose, semi-poetry into a poignant shapshot of a moment in time. In some hands, this would be merely pathetic. In Fogelberg’s, it rings true and one discovers empathy with the artist that is not manipulated but rather summoned. A musician worthy of only frowns would not pull this off. That is why Fogelberg is more than that. Sometimes only a little more, but regularly much more.

‘Dancing Shoes’ is probably the best tune of the album. It risks its own dance with both narcissism and pretension, but in the end summons up a poignant recognition that things long lost remain both bitter and sweet beyond time. Wishing well for a lost love savors of both flavors, sometimes for time without horizon:

Dancing shoes on the wall above your bedside
Saw it all as we performed our pirouette
Fleshes fused as the flicker of the candles
Threw upon the wall a single silhouette
Tu es dans ma coeur et dans ma tete

Dancing shoes we have loved on distant beaches
Where the winter never reaches there we fell
Dying swan on the dawn you danced before me
Though your eyes were dark and stormy I stood still
Qui peut dire le faux et le reel

Dancing shoes though the distances divide us
There’s a paradise inside us we can’t lose
Me and you dance a ‘pas de deux’ forever
And I pray you never shed your dancing shoes

As though working his way through the catalogue of artistic vices, ‘Loose Ends’ flirts with self-absorbed pomp with its slow, labored pace and its exploration of psychological chaos. Yet it too escapes the wolf in the nick of time, meriting quotation in full:

Climbing a mountain in darkness
Stranded alone on the ledge
Every attempt that I make to hold on
Pushes me nearer the edge
Sensing the changes impending
My thoughts are diffused by despair
I feel like I’m swimming straight up underwater
Desperately racing for air
I’m racing for air

And the chords struck at birth grow more distant
Yet, we strike them again and again
And we plead and we pray for a glimmer of day
As the night folds its wings and descends
Exposing the loose ends

Surrounding myself with possessions
I surely have more than I need
I don’t know if this is justice hard earned
Or simply a matter of greed
A matter of greed

In spite of what might be taken as overly negative qualification, this is a fine CD. Returning to it after a very long time reminds one not of the proverbial dog circling back ’round to his (artistic) vomit but rather to stopping by a sight meaningful from one’s youth, soaking in the still audible resonances, and returning to life as it is today.

This is a good thing, fueled by Fogelberg’s lyrics, voice, guitar, and by that very large heart stapled right there on his flannel sleeve.