Review of "Second Wind" Album by Shane Pendergast

In the words of Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living. There is probably no better starting point to approach Second Wind, Prince Edward Islander Shane Pendergast’s second album of folk music, conceived in a period of history where disruption of the world we knew has allowed for an opportunity to turn inwards. In the initial listening, it would seem that Pendergast has used this time well. On the surface, this collection of Maritime and Folk flavoured odes, ballads and melodies is well crafted and musically pleasing, but with a deeper listen, as with most significant recordings, the album can be seen as a reflective puzzle that touches on some of the biggest questions of life. There is a trickery in the way that questions and ideas are cached throughout the album, and one of the cleverest touches is that the song tracks take on added poignancy when listened to from end to beginning. Life Will Settle Down Sometime is the final cut of the album but a good starting point for an album of introspection. “Life will settle down some time, until then I’ll keep moving on”, and move we do through songs that touch on the core of human alienation. The Song of 52 is a song about the loneliest whale in the world, one whose whale song, at 52 hertz, is incompatible with members of it’s kind, forcing it to roam the sea in solitude. Man With Stories juxtapositions the weight of the past with the shallowness of modern life. Even in the most upbeat tracks of the album there are lingering doubts. Yours to Borrow is a spin of words straight of a dance floor and a celebration of heady desire, but the fun is tempered with suspicion, “Will you feel the same tomorrow”. So the overwhelming brooding heart of the album is track by track revealed. Fiddle Playin’ Girl is as romantically and sentimentally East Coast as is gets… or is it? “Gonna to be a cold and quiet winter/Still I wish you’d change your plans/Gonna be a cold and quiet winter/Gonna be a cold and quiet man”. Echoes of disappointment are found throughout Second Wind. And in a careful balance, trust in the deeper meaning of past traditions becomes the travel companion of angst. Tell Me What’s Changed as the middle track of the album is symbolically the most protected by the songs around it. There is found a cautious query. In a time that questions and tears down the wrongs of history, Pendergast questions if we also lose, in a rush to reform, some of the noble human qualities that have made the inner “life worth living”: bravery, perseverance, truth, discipline. The deft trickery of the album is again found in Waltz of the Figurehead Maiden. It is in the flawless weaving of language that Pendergast excels, and this track is not just a nod to the definitive sea shanty but an instant classic that would not be out of place in a dusty collection of songs of the sea hidden at the bottom of a sea captain’s chest. Once again, the brilliance of the song is not just the writing, but the hiding symbolically of deeper questions, in this case about death itself. In a sense we all live out our days as a tipsy stroll on the sands of life and are tricked into death, the “siren’s cruel snare”. To know folk music is to appreciate that motifs are central to the depth of the songwriting craft. The themes are universal and the reason why “old” songs still please the ear and touch the soul. So now two of the most heartbreaking songs of Second Wind. Autumn Rain is at once beautiful, dark, and terribly sad. It is a song that you never tire of listening to because the melody and lyricism are perfectly matched. What Waltz of the Figurehead Maiden is to salt water, Autumn Rain is to the earth. There is a sense of the human position between the rich loam and the cruel rain that is equal parts hopeless and yielding. This is the human condition and with “collar flipped up” we exist even when life is “ wipers on a dry windshield”. It Slips Away is as plain language as it gets. “It slips away/The world we knew/It’s turning gray/Like old things do”. There in those lines is a profundity that can be found all through this album, and the cunning switch of “like all things do” to “like old things do” to match the “it’s turning gray” lyric is so so typical of the simple elegance with which Pendergast engages and masters language. Behind the simplicity of the writing is a thought and effort that is obviously unobvious. So now the beginning of the album which this writer sees as a fitting end. The track Cassady’s Hill is loaded with literary and folk music references. Once again the significance of these references is hidden in a feel good, country fair, moonshine soaked, campfire frolic. The characters however are ghosts from the past, beginning with Neil Cassady, a prominent figure of both the Beat generation and the Psychedelic movement and even Butch Cassidy, the notorious bank robber of the 1880’s. If there is one line that is a key to the song it is the portrayal of the “ne’er do wells”, flocking to this unruly gathering. It is here that Pendergast aligns himself with the gritty romanticism of the past, written and lived. There is much going on behind the scenes on this album, much thought, and a good dose of wistfulness, but that can be missed in such tunes as the title track Second Wind which is a holler along, upbeat ode to renewal and resumption. The lead off to the album is in this reviewer’s viewpoint a fitting “end” to an album this wise. Every verse is not only a spiritual comeback but even a physical resurrections as is shown most bluntly in the final stanza where, on “your death bed”, the second wind, by way of the “window”, is either the breath of life in, or the flight of the spirit out. Second Wind is at once a starting point and a fitting end. The album is masterful and moving, and has enough hidden contemplations to say definitively: “The unexamined album is not worth a listen”.