- Welcome to Daytrotter
- At The End Of The Line
- Off The Main Drag
- Cairo Blues
- From The Fourth
Canadian Leif Vollebekk has a song here entitled, “At The End Of The Line,” but nearly every single one in this tiny collection of songs sounds like he’s given a similar address. They are desolate inner conversations that sprawl out with their boniness. They are all elbows and knees — the drawn out and smoky tails to conversations, with words and expressions hanging loosely in the air, like forgotten fixtures. These are the dim thoughts that you’re left with when the real life and moving bodies have left the room, left the house. These are the smoldering remainders that we get to keep in our back pockets, in our wallets, and we get to pull them out to look at every so often, when memories kick in, but don’t worked perfectly.
Vollebekk is an astute writer and an admirer of stories that are full of drama but aren’t what you’d call dramatic. They are cinematic and they’re big, gorgeous and dreadful all at the same time. You’re lucky if the clouds part once within them, but he does dreariness so delightfully, giving us encounters such as the one we hear in “Off The Main Drag,” when he sings, “We’d always talked about going for a beer/She said it’s strange now that you’re here/We went back to her place/57th Street, we crossed it/She’s about as poor as me but she looks twice as good.” It’s a toss-up if any of what happened was good. If it was all crummy though, he makes you feel like you’ll take it anyway.