Coast To Coast 2024
Traveler’s Heart
Lassoing the spirit of Americana, Amsterdam singer-songwriter has a few smiles in store to sprinkle all over his tunes.
Starting an album with a lyrical sting seems to become a part of this artist’s modus operandi, but it’s a tactic that’s impossible to bemoan, especially when an opening line is followed by melodic delights – and those are plenty on Eric Devries’ fifth full-length record. While the songs on “Traveler’s Heart” have more of a bluegrass flavor to them than the numbers on "Song & Dance Man" exuded, they also demonstrate a more pronounced storytelling perspective and a more salient sense of humor which summarily enrich each of the cuts on offer here. There are heroes and heroines on display, yet what the devil’s dozen pieces bring to the table will amount to a memorable cinematic jaunt through one’s soul – a trip overcast with doubts and casting grief aside.
Not coincidentally the aforementioned poetic hook – “Have you ever had a feeling we’re in a dream?” – that “Shadow Of A Man” playfully hurls at the listener from a weave of delicately frailed banjo and gently sawed fiddle as well as other words Devries is mouthing create an expectancy which Iain Matthews and Fay Lovsky’s vocal harmonies help Eric’s honeyed voice take to heaven and, at the same time, emphasize the flaws of his persona. Still, if “Miss Holly Golightly” and, further down the road, “Ballad Of Johnny & Ginny” paint sympathetic portraits of hoedown-seeking characters this performer might meet wandering across literary terrain and actual land, the rockier, resonant tales like “Hit The Road Running” with its perfect Dylan parody added for good measure – rather than country-baroque balladry of the title track, where Janos Koolen’s strings sparkle, or the familial intimacy of “What If It’s A Boy” – shape a genuine adventure. The homeward-bound “Wheels In Motion” doesn’t have to get sped up, though, to catch fire, and “Shine” doesn’t have to dazzle the audience with its instrumental brilliance to light up one’s mood, but “Angels In The Snow” and the “No Expectations”-referencing “Walk Back In The Rain” require displacement of tenderness to relay their optimistic, weather-defying messages.
That’s why the sorrow of “All Because Of You” this album’s bidding farewell with turns into spiritual triumph and gratitude – because that’s where a traveler’s heart has to be: near one’s hearth. Here’s another milestone on Eric Devries’ route to eternity.
*****
