"'Snake Road' is just sort of beating myself up about my behaviour at a certain point in my life," Ron says, "but in a good-natured and hopeful way. I love how it turned out and I loved Mitchell's arrangement, but sometimes you write a song where you wish you had a different kind of voice – more like a John Lennon or something." "Back of My Hand" is Beatlishly beautiful in its evocation of déjà vu, whereas "Sneak Out the Back Door" – the only solo turn on the album and its most instantly ingratiating tune – is a finger-picked front-porch singalong about exiting the world with no pomp or ceremony. "'Back Of My Hand' sounded almost like something the Rutles might have done," Ron remembers, "so I thought we should try and get it out of that Beatles zone and put it back into whatever my zone is. I started playing it on the Reso-Phonic guitar and it started to come back to my side a little bit more. Again, I was writing it at the time when I had that cancer scare, and people I hadn't seen for a while kept coming up to me and saying hi. And I started to get this weird feeling that I'd been there before and I wondered, 'Is that how it feels when you're dying?' It was the last song I wrote for the album." Another of Forever Endeavour's peaks is "Blind Eye", a dreamy reflection on empathy whose spacey strings-and-French-horn intro could have come from Jimmy Webb's "Land's End". "The song isn't pointing the finger at anyone," says Ron. "I just think sometimes, 'Wow, I'm so lucky to have ended up in this country that seems relatively sane compared to some parts of the world where there's all this craziness going on. So the song is trying to be aware that people are struggling." "Lost in Thought" is dreamier still, cut from the cloth that gave us "Doomed", "Child Star" and so many other Sexsmith masterpieces of serene stillness. Lightening the sometimes sombre mood are "She Does My Heart Good", a bouncy song of marital endearment, and "Me, Myself and Wine", a lighthearted track about what Ron gets up to when Mrs. Sexsmith is not around. "'Me, Myself and Wine' is mostly just about my love of listening to records while having a glass of wine," he says. "I remember when people would buy a new album and they'd say, 'Hey, do you wanna come over and listen to it?' People are so busy or so distracted now, but I don't have an iPhone or any of that stuff and I like to get into albums as a whole. There still seems to be this need to document a collection of songs and present them in album form, so I don't know if it'll ever go away. I always tend to write in batches, and it always feels like these are songs that belong together in some way and in some order." Sexsmith often saves his best for last, and "The Morning Light" – a magical yoking-together of each day's rebirth with the shadow of the memento mori that none of us can escape – is no exception to that rule. After the sugar high that was ‘Long Player Late Bloomer’, ‘Forever Endeavour’ is all about slow-energy release, a collection that sits more seamlessly next to earlier Froom productions like ‘Other Songs’ (1997) and ‘Whereabouts’ (1999). Melancholy without being maudlin, spare without being simplistic, Sexsmith's songs are invariably underpinned by an acceptance of life as it actually is. "There's so much out there that's really frivolous, and from my very first album I've always tried to write about things in a way that was realistic and grown-up," he says. "Whatever subject you're on, you want to try and tackle it head-on. I think that's how a song is able to resonate with people. If you're going miles out of your way to say something to people, or you're trying to be clever, you're setting yourself up for a letdown. "With every album you do, it's just a new batch of songs and you try to find your way into it and find what the best surroundings would be for them. For people who've been following my career for all this time, I guess it will seem like a return to Other Songs or one of those sort of things. But I think I'm a better singer and I think I've gotten a little more accurate with the songwriting. There's a lot of stuff Mitchell used to help me with that I can do myself now. "I really do think this is the record I've been trying to make my whole career, but for some reason either I wasn't singing good enough or didn't have the right songs. It really came together this time with the songs and the production and my voice, where I was singing the way I heard in my head. When I handed in the record, the label folks were talking about an 'angle' for the record, and I don't think in terms of 'angles'. I'm just really proud of it." Barney Hoskyns Discography: Grand Opera Lane (1991) Ron Sexsmith (1995) Other Songs (1997) Whereabouts (1999) Blue Boy (2001) Cobblestone Runway (2002) Rarities (2003) Retriever (2004) Destination Unknown (2005, with Don Kerr, released as Sexsmith & Kerr) Time Being (2006) Exit Strategy Of The Soul (2008) Long Player Late Bloomer (2011) Tour Dates: January 16 London, UK St. Pancras Old Church February 20 Belfast, UK Limelight February 21 Dublin, IE The Academy February 23 Barcelona, ES Apolo 2 February 24 Madid, ES Sala el Sol February 27 Koln, DE Kulturkirsche February 28 Paris, FR La Maroquinerie March 01 Brussels, BE La Rotonde at Botanique March 03 Berlin, DE Heimafather March 04 Hamburg, DE Knust March 05 Amsterdam, NL People's Place March 07 London, UK Royal Albert Hall © RonSexsmith.com 2005 - 2013.
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