Tag Archives: Whereabouts

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Song of the Day #1,045: ‘Seem to Recall’ – Ron Sexsmith

Ron Sexsmith has borrowed from Bob Dylan the tendency to put his strongest songs at the end of his albums. Sexsmith usually ends his records with a romantic ballad (I mentioned Brad Paisley recently as an expert modern-day writer of love songs, and Sexsmith shares the talent).

‘April After All,’ the closing track on Other Songs, is particularly lovely, the sort of song that could have become a standard if Sexsmith was around 50 years ago.

‘Seem to Recall,’ the last song on Whereabouts, is my favorite track from that album. It’s about looking back with longing and regret.

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Song of the Day #1,044: ‘The Idiot Boy’ – Ron Sexsmith

Ron Sexsmith’s third album, 1999’s Whereabouts, featured slicker production than his first two and was a little more adventurous musically. On the whole, I like the songs a little less than the earlier material, but that’s nitpicking.

References to God show up a lot in Sexsmith’s work, and I’m not sure if he’s a practicing Christian or if he just likes the imagery (in the way that artists such as Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen find poetry in religious language). I’m exposing my religious bigotry by stating that I hope it’s the latter.

Today’s song is more an indictment of man than a celebration of God.

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Song of the Day #497: ‘Right About Now’ – Ron Sexsmith

If I were to give an award to the most consistent performer in my music collection, I’m pretty sure it would go to Ron Sexsmith. He’s released seven or eight solo albums now and there isn’t a bad song on any of them.

He’s so consistent, in fact, that if you were to play me one of those songs I would have a hard time naming which album it’s on. It’s as if he sat down and recorded 100 expertly crafted gems and then listed them in random order and assigned twelve at a time to different albums.

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