Artist – John Witherspoon
Album – Heart In Head Out
Released – 9th June 2023
Reviewer – Owen Gurrey, Liverpool Acoustic
In a recent podcast interview for the Red Shutter Club in Liverpool, John Witherspoon was asked what success as a musician looked like. His response was reassuringly prosaic: ‘if it’s a job, and you’re supporting yourself, you’ve won’. There’s a sense that this statement feels hard won, born from playing and hosting live music across the city for over 15 years, and having met some inspirational people along the way. There’s a tacit understanding that success is seldom self-earned. You need others. A celebration of people, place and music-oriented memories is riven through Witherspoon’s latest album, Heart in Head Out, which follows 2020’s excellent Showin’ Up, Startin’ Again.
Listening to John’s measured responses in that conversation about Liverpool’s live music scene, he speaks without ego or any sense of self-congratulation. Committing to playing music involves a good deal of failure and the courage to keep plugging away. More than this, it’s often the opposite of success where the fertile ground for songwriting resides. Professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University, Joe Moran says in his book, If You Should Fail, ‘being human means being a failure.’ His book is a ‘book of solace’, happily recasting the idea of failure not as a stepping-stone to success, so beloved of the managerial class, but as a sure sign of being alive.
That same sentiment of accommodating failure pervades Heart In Head Out, ten tracks that combine wistful romantic detailing of various failures and regrets with a knowing sense that life is a series of disappointments fretted with moments of pure joy and abandon.
In personal highlight, ‘Dublin on my mind’ we’re taken to the fever of a time and place through reverie. Music, love, and fate all combine here. Love is a transcendental experience in this Irish inflected, unbounded love song that listeners will take to heart. There’s a hotel room and the singular memory of someone almost backlit as ‘she comes down the stairs in the morning’. It’s that rare thing, a love song that’s neither apology or blame, but shows romance in all its rawness, crossing between myth and tradition. I feel my heart lift on the last chorus, wanting to sing it out loud on my first listen.
Elsewhere, ‘Alive’ is another celebration of the happiness that comes from aimlessness – the serendipity of life. Things we’re not in quest of create the sharpest memories. The ‘oh my oh my’ of the pre chorus is tender, bordering on self-reproach, but delivered in a knowing way, unapologetic for these nostalgic moments. Never has the memory of a ‘kickabout with strangers’ felt so elegiac.
Witherspoon has a poet’s sense of lyric possibility. There are lines poised between the urbane and the philosophical, much as pub conversations with strangers can often be, indeed the evocative names of some pubs appear across the album. There is an openness to grace in his music, giving thanks to a host of people (and Guinness), and this is what John does so well, capturing the essence of the people in his life.
After the first song ‘I wish I’d tried’ which sets a reflective tone, he often moves away from the lyric ‘I’ to these other people. He names famous figures, (Luke Kelly, John Lennon) as well as walk-on parts to his own story with songs like the stripped back piano and vocal number, ‘Patricia’; an upbeat nod to those who remain admirably set in their ways, ‘Locked Down John’, and the tribute to a lifelong friend in ‘Christopher’s Heart’. These songs all carry on from older songs about his mother, father, and brother.
There’s no anxiety of influence for Witherspoon either, the album’s title feels like a working through of unfinished business, learning to accept guilt or shame, or the things we fret about having left behind in regret or error. His lyrics occupy this terrain, and in the single, ‘Shame’ he dispels the idea of cheap consolation in retrospect; better to learn to accommodate our mistakes and regrets as he sings the refrain, ‘that shame is mine’. Those episodic memories that stick with us have that life affirming sense that despite our flaws, there is good in the world, and there are possibilities of wonder, even redemption in the everyday.
Witherspoon’s lyrics promote our relationships, not just those close to us, but those people we quietly admire from afar, captured lovingly in the closing track’s tribute to an unnamed singer, ‘Don’t Let it Get Away’. With this album, we have an accomplished songwriter who treads the line between head and heart. The result is songs that make you feel human, caught as we are, always somewhere between those poles of success and failure.
Owen Gurrey
Review © 2023 Owen Gurrey, Liverpool Acoustic
Heart In Head Out was released on 9th June and is available to download from the links at ditto.fm/heart-in-head-out