When you write a song titled “My Funeral” – a song about piling dirt on a grave in the rain – you end your album with it. But Tim Gearan put “My Funeral” second to last on new album “Hammer and A Bell.” Instead, Gearan closes the LP with “Things That You See,” a track that brims with love, rebirth, and visceral joys.
“It’s an old fashioned love song,” Gearan said of “Things That You See.” “It comes from observing what my wife does on a daily basis.”
“Hammer and A Bell” is a tender, wry record with plenty of darkness. But the pandemic-written set balances shade with light – “The songs follow the ideas of time flying by exponentially as I get older,” he said. But even “My Funeral” has playfulness to it, lyrically contrasting New Orleans rollicking funeral traditions with bleak New England affairs. The tune comes off somewhere between Taj Mahal’s roots music and Randy Newman sardonic wit.
Many locals think of Gearan as an ace blues guitarist. A couple decades of residences around Cambridge and Somerville have reinforced Gearan’s reputation as a ripper. But “Hammer and A Bell” generally skips electric guitar solos in favor of acoustic fingerpicking – Gearan will focus on these songs at his Aug. 12 show at Club Passim.
“Before I got the blues bug, my first love was an acoustic guitar, and Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Jim Croce, stuff in my mom’s record collection and on ’70s AM radio,” Gearan said. “I spent 20 years playing blues and r&b and that kind of thing, so it’s kind of a welcome return to what I loved as a kid.”
On “Hammer and A Bell,” the music is there to simply provide a frame for Gearan’s insights on aging, family and fear (and fearlessness). Recorded and mixed by Jeremy Moses Curtis at his studio in Barrington, RI, Curtis also kept things simple. Kris Delmhorst sang a few harmonies, Jeff Berlin played a little drums, and Curtis added sparse-but-essential keyboard parts.
“These were songs that were written during that quiet period when everybody was locked up, and we kind of wanted to respect that,” Gearan said. “Jeremy did a great job of not producing it as fully as some people might.”
To call it underproduced would be a disservice to what Curtis did, so maybe it’s better to call the record delicately-produced. The big, swaggering horns (and chorus) of Gearan’s 2012 LP “Riverboat” are gone. In their place are left of center noises (and verses).
“There was a mood created by him, these kind of old-time movie effects behind the songs,” Gearan said. “It could have been, ‘Oh, this has a country vibe so let’s put fiddles on it.’ We went almost in the opposite direction of that.”
“Hammer and A Bell” is a hushed, contemplative masterpiece. But, hey, not everybody likes hushed, contemplative masterpieces. Thankfully, these songs here are just a slice of the stockpile Gearan has accumulated.
“I am due to make a guitar record,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen next. ‘Hammer and A Bell’ are just 11 songs out of 30 I have written in the past few years and I still want to do something with the others.”
For music, tickets and details, visit timgearanmusic.com