Beware Wolves Volume 3 CD
Beware Wolves is as restless as a ghost, a wry, haunted songwriter spiriting across styles, sounds, moods, and decades. You might hear him in dark woods or moonlit clearings, heart-aching melodies, salvific harmonies, and buzzing acoustic guitars like a voice on the wind.
Sometimes, he’s wrapped in rapturous ennui, shaking a doomed love’s death rattle, only to lurch, fangs bared, into a drunken master’s foot-stomping groove. In the morning, you find embers, but there are too many trails to know which way he’s gone.
Volume 3 finds the songwriter in a liminal mood, caught between desperate pursuits and giving up ghosts. Only For the Love of You, a Loudon Wainwright-if-psych gloss on love and eternity, admits “Time, one of these days, is gonna take me.”
Glow is sweeter and sadder, layers of vocals and guitars creeping vinewise in and around a lolling lullaby you’d hand to John Prine on a back porch. Goodbye, Starry Evening states the record’s thesis, intoning in a luscious milk-and-honey harmony, “Don’t hold on too tight, you’ll lose your grip.”
And closer Heaven & Earth underlines the thought over a gentle pickin’ and musin’ guitar figure, drifting into the ether with the lyrics “I used to wonder but now I know / If you want to hold on, let it go.”