November 23, 2007
This review originally ran in FolkWax issue #347 on 11/22/2007
Dave Gunning
House For Sale
Wee House Of Music Records
FolkWax Rating: 8 out of 10
Nothing But A Song
Last year’s seasonal Christmas collection apart, producer Jamie Robinson helmed Dave Gunning’s previous studio outing Two-Bit World [2004], which was voted Folk Album of the Year in the 2005 East Coast Music Awards, and the recording also gained the Music Industry of Nova Scotia Folk Album of the Year Award. Gunning co-wrote nine of the eleven songs on House For Sale, with collaborators old and new. Tere is also a cover of the thirty-some-year-old Pete Goble/Leroy Drumm Bluegrass classic “Colleen Malone,” a sad tale of love and death, plus a rendition of Robbie Robertson’s “Twilight,” a song that was much loved by the late Rick Danko. The Band’s version first appeared on a single, then on The Best Of The Band [1976], and later on Across The Great Divide [1994], the group’s first box set. A demo version surfaced on the enhanced edition of Northern Lights – Southern Cross [2001] and as a member of Danko, Andersen and Fjeld, Danko covered the song on Ridin’ On The Blinds [1994], while a live reading appeared on the Appleseed two-CD reissue One More Shot [2002].
Gunning and Robinson collaborate as writers on four of the songs here. The first of the quartet, “These Roads,” is a late summer road song in which a traveller dreams of returning home to the one he truly loves – “I miss you more each time I go.” The themes of home and love resurface on the allusion-filled “Fade On The Line” – in this instance, it’s love lost - a song that Gunning wrote with Newfoundland-born Stephen Bowers, currently a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based, recording artist. A sense of loss also pervades the second Robinson/Gunning collaboration, “House For Sale.” Located on a “dead end street/With a backyard view of a factory” the lyric indicates that the factory (or some other local workplace) is closing down, when we’re informed “But now we’re hearing that the work is done/They’re gonna cut their losses one by one.” As a result, the feeling that this community faces a slow, lingering death pervades the lyric. Shouldered with this dilemma, the narrator voices his concerns for the future and for his house for sale. As it happens, the hand of God intervenes in the form of an electrical storm. Gunning wrote “Cowboy’s Dream” with his long-time friend George Canyon (real name Fred George Lays Jr.). Canyon placed second in the 2004 Nashville Star television reality show and in their western-themed collaboration, a rodeo cowboy muses on his life - past, present, and future.
Mystery pervades the events that unfold in “Dust To Dust,” the third Robinson/Gunning collaboration. The setting is a funeral and as the song closes the mourners leave a woman praying “In the shade of his stone,” although the nature of what occurred years earlier when “one night he crossed a thousand lines” can only be the subject of conjecture. One thing remains true, “He used to say that she was pretty/With her mother’s golden hair.” Similar to “Cowboy’s Dream,” in “Hard Workin’ Hands,” co-written by Gunning and Newfoundland-bred musician Dr. Ron Hynes - the writers also share the vocal - a worker, now world weary and aged, reflects on his lifetime of honest toil. J. P. Cormier, the highly respected Cape Breton-based musician, and Gunning have performed together and collaborated as writers in the past and their “April Girl” is a song of praise to love, death, and rebirth. The second Bowers/Gunning collaboration in this set is the poignant “Taking Turns” and the album closes with “Nothing But A Song.” This enigmatic Robinson/Gunning co-write focuses on a desperate seventeen year old whose final taste, in this life, was that of steel from a stolen gun.
Arthur Wood is a founding editor of FolkWax.
