What a great album – and what a great story to lift the heart in these fetid times. A story that crosses oceans and decades and brings together a Canadian singer-songwriter for once worthy of the label “legend” and a bunch of Bob Harris Emerging Artist Award-winners with a clutch of well-received albums under their belt.
Dreams is the result of a collaboration between Canadian Songwriters Hall of Famer Bonnie Dobson and the Hanging Stars, five “cosmic cowboys” comprised of Richard Olson (guitar, vocals, percussion), Patrick Ralla (guitar, keyboard), Paul Milne (bass), Sean Reed (horns, percussion), and Paulie Cobra (drums, percussion). Dobson – who followed her heart to London in 1969, continued singing for a time, had kids, went to Birkbeck to complete the politics, philosophy and history degree she’d abandoned back in Toronto, and then stayed on as an administrator in the philosophy department – never gave up writing and singing. But it was mostly for herself, until Jarvis Cocker persuaded her to play Meltdown and publicly reclaim a song she’d written in 1961, “Morning Dew”, her first song and written in LA where she was opening for Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ashgrove. In those happy-go-lucky leftie-folky days, before “the music business”, she never copyrighted it – and the song was brazenly stolen by Tim Rose. Almost a hundred musicians have recorded it, among them the Grateful Dead, Lulu, Lee Hazlewood, Jeff Beck, with Rod Stewart on vocals, Nazareth, and Robert Plant, who played a role in the story of the song’s reclamation. Justice finally done.
Dobson – who performed on the same rickety stages as Bob Dylan (“I knew him when he was funny”) and all the other musicians who honed their craft at such Greenwich Village clubs as Gerdes Folk City, and who featured in the famous 1962 Time magazine cover story on “The Folk Girls” – fell in with the Hanging Stars at the Betsy Trotwood, a Clerkenwell pub that’s a locus of the acoustic scene. Her hair may not be quite as Titian red as it was when Robert Shelton wrote his laudatory New York Times review, but her sparkling eyes and still-glorious voice belie her age – 84, like all her Village compadres (pictured right: a 1962 poster designed by Eric Von Schmidt promoting Bonnie Dobson).
And Dreams is not an album of retreads – seven of the songs are Dobson’s, only one of them (“Stay With Me Tonight”) previously recorded, and the eighth is an exhilarating cover of Chet Powers’ “Get Together”, a high Sixties song which fits well with the band’s psychedelic folk groove, bringing everything together perfectly. Check out the video for the single, “Baby’s Got the Blues”, a poignant song written after she lost her husband, and step back in time!
It's a well-paced album, and there are some gloriously-wrought arrangements: The Mariachi horns on “Don’t Look Down”, a song of survival in the wake of great loss. The horn and strings on “You Don’t Know”, which showcases Dobson’s vocal, breathy and full of longing. The rolling country-rock of “Stay With Me Tonight”. The full-blooded synth-based arrangement with heavy guitar solo that counterpoints the dreamy delivery of “On a Morning Like This”, a morning less Chelsea and more West Coast. The album’s title track closes the set, a dream of returning to Canada (a thought on the minds of many people right now), of walking in Somerset, and of her beloved Shropshire, a landscape of happy memories. You can always go home again, but you never can go back she sings. So true.
But in this album, we do sort-of go back. Time and oceans have been crossed, and against all the odds a wonderful artist whose voice and presence are still lovingly remembered in Greenwich Village has emerged into the spotlight once more to claim her rightful place in the pantheon of great 1960s singer-songwriters. Old fans will not be disappointed, while new ones who buy this album because they follow the Hanging Stars will, I hope, want to explore Dobson’s remarkable back catalogue of a dozen albums which, because she is Canadian, draws on a wider range of North American songs than was often the case. Among them: Take Me for a Walk in the Morning Dew (2015) which includes outstanding renditions of the folk classics “Peter Amberley” and “Dink’s Song”, and Vive La Canadienne, a collection of rarities, plus of course those early 1960s albums, not least Bonnie Dobson at Folk City, recorded live at Gerdes in summer 1962, which includes “Morning Dew”. Wasn’t that a time!
“They say that things happen when you least expect them to” Bonnie Dobson sings in “Trouble”, the album’s upbeat second track. It is indeed a lovely late-life surprise by someone who still runs rings around so many of today’s singer-songwriters. Laura Marling, eat your heart out.
