Mike Ireland & Holler – Try Again
Like Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) — though not to the same intricate degree — Try Again is carefully assembled of interlocking parts. And, like Welch, Ireland has found elegant ways to fashion utterly contemporary songs from older sounds, to use old sounds to frame the moment. Try Again opens with “Welcome Back”, a song about ending up in the neighborhood you thought you’d left forever, dedicated in the liner notes to his late father. Then Ireland moves, ever so gently, to “Right Back Where I Started”, written about more interior places filled with dark clouds and rain, each verse resolving in the phrase “‘Cuz happy never lasts.”
“Mr. Rain” follows, a wry salute to those same dark clouds that “fill the world with all the tears I cry.” And so the album progresses, strings surging gently in the background, Dan Mesh’s guitar always sympathetic, Ireland’s voice sweet and smooth, even suave and self-assured throughout. But rather than a long study in loneliness, the album builds slowly toward the dim, equally troubling hope of new love.
We are brought, then, to the wonderfully tender “Sweet Sweetheart”, the tentative “I’d Like To” (which first appeared on a Bloodshot compilation in 2000), and the almost resolute “Love’s The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do”. Love with open wounds is still a slow dance, but the final trilogy — the title song, Charlie Rich’s “Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs”, and the concluding “Let Me Hold You” — is as resilient (and touching) as anything Ireland has offered.
Several of these songs were on demos he shared two years ago, offering a preview of what this record might be when No Depression picked him as one of five emerging insurgents. He has sharpened the writing, of course (it was originally “Love’s The Hardest Thing We’ll Ever Do” for example), but the real growth between records is in his voice. It is a subtle change. No longer do his vocals depend upon the memory of the hurt which drove him to write, though that’s still present. Now he is an assured interpreter, able to focus equally on the words and the art of singing. He has emerged a quietly powerful vocalist.
Though Ireland has long covered “Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs” in concert, it takes no little nerve to commit to the song on disc. It is, arguably, Rich’s finest recorded moment, and (inarguably, it says here) one of country’s greatest songs. Written by Rich’s wife, Margaret Ann, it is an extraordinary love song, phrased from the perspective of a work-worn man returning home to tell his wife there will be no raise, no new house, no new dress, nothing…and everything.
Everything…everything I care about in music can be found in Rich’s version, and no matter how often I cue the track, “Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs” makes me cry. And, when nobody is around, it makes me sing. Loudly, for there is no greater hope than to fail and be loved.
Mike Ireland’s vocal gifts do not resemble those of Charlie Rich, nor are their audiences the same. Rich might well have presumed his listeners had lived the song; Ireland can guess his listeners know Rich’s original, and connect (as he does) to its emotion, not its details. No, Ireland does not make me cry, not on that track. He asks you to think deeply, to feel quietly, to hold onto yourself and, ultimately, to be willing to hold onto somebody else.
And he’s right: Love is the hardest thing we’ll ever do.