Oh Danny Boy, Your Music is Really Good
“Century City’s got its vampire eyes and its low sequined lies. I am out of my head again.”
Dan Collins’ debut studio album, You Can’t Go Home, is an album about madness. The madness of pure joy and the madness of crushing despair. The madness of defining home and the madness of realizing you can never go back. The madness of finding love and the madness of finding out love will crush you as soon as it will lift you up. It is an album of pure, wonderful, perfect, ecstatic madness.
“I’ve been working hard for nothing, so hard but nothing never came my way.”
If you follow the open-mic/singer-songwriter scene that has been thriving in Philadelphia for the past few years, there is a pretty good chance you at least know of Dan Collins. He is a transplant from the wilds of Ithaca and Maine, but he has made the Philly suburbs his home for the last decade and in that time has created a name for himself in the seedy underbelly north of Market.
“Wide awake, staring at the screen, thinking it’s a give and take. I’m giving and you can’t take it.”
The first thing that struck me about this record is Collins’ ability to skip between pop melodies (Century City Blues, Lost At Sea) and country ballad drawl (Hard For Nothing, You Can’t Go Home) easily and honestly. Despite being an album about madness, Collins’ has an impeccable sense of control over everything. The music is sometimes understated and sometimes a loud storm, full of cello and thunder. The vocals are at times sweet and sincere (“Oh today, whatcha got coming my way?”), at times raspy and demanding (“I want everything in this world!”), and at times perfectly harmonized (“I’ve been writing the same old lines these days,” with the assistance of Katie Barbato of The Sleepwells).
“You can’t go home, you can’t go home. You’re smiling like roses, but you’re made from stone.”
What I think makes this album so worth listening to is the challenge it offers to the listener. The album opens “welcome to higher life, you can’t come down anymore, you could find your tarnished heart crying just outside your door.” With this you are invited into a world of madness, sadness, joy, hope, condemnation, and forgiveness. This is not a record you can listen to complacently. Each song forces you to engage with it. It presents stories, circumstances, and dilemmas then wants you to figure out how you would deal with them. It is an album that you won’t come out of the same person you went into. But, despite all the sadness and madness, it is an album that leaves you with hope.
“It’s alright, just making good on our time.”
P.S. Dan Collins is also a poet. In the near future, I’ll be doing a review of his book of poems “of go & why” in the Blaine’s Ramblings section. I’m not sure the logistics of it all, but there may be a surprise involved in that article, so keep your eyes peeled.
