Listen to most any song by North Attleboro native Ian Fitzgerald and the first thing to grab you might be his sheer mastery of phonetics. Tightly rhymed syllables snake their way through verses to the point where unpacking the sounds in these phrases becomes a prerequisite for unpacking their latent meaning. Still, it’s a challenge well worth the effort: all that lyrical density affords the songs a number of spins before they finally reveal their full meaning in sum.
At 24, Fitzgerald is a bona fide folkster, so the emphasis on lyrical content comes as no surprise. His songs have a twang to them, with his sound flashing the influence of both Dylan and alt-country rockers. Fitzgerald performs his live act solo, which is also unsurprising.
With lackadaisical guitar strumming and nonchalant singing, he manages to cut to the essence of his act--that is, the barebones presentation of his masterful songwriting. And though he has used band arrangements for his two studio albums---2005’s Torn Up Routes and this year’s Former Glory--the full sound never obstructs the central quality of the songs: the words, and their delivery through Fitzgerald’s stern, tight-mouthed drawl.
The songs on Former Glory are brimming with shining, dark images and unexpected metaphors, all enmeshed in Fitzgerald’s trademark phonetic maze. It would be enough for Fitzgerald to be a master at just one of these things--either the imagery or the trickster wordplay--but, lucky for us, he is equally adept at both.
For instance, try to wrap your vocal cords around this set of lyrics from "Concrete Mirror": "You curse worse than murder / your words works in circles / Stairs spiral in your eyes / and I’m spinning still." Fitzgerald is not the first songwriter to cram together "curse" and "worse", but rare is the singer who can execute a tongue-twister while keeping such a firm hold on the description he is conveying. And then there are the lines that introduce the album-starter, "Idle Hands," foreshadowing Former Glory’s theme of desperation, complemented by Fitzgerald’s knack for strange and unsettling imagery: "Things are getting ugly but at least we’re not alone / There’s money in the marrow if you’d only break your bones."
Despite his wonderfully abundant descriptions of things and places--gunsmoke, thievery and geography all make recurrent appearances on Former Glory--many of these songs, at their root, concern the central theme of the singer-songwriter: human relationships. Every few songs, we hear a casual remark about missing someone far away, or laying one’s head in another’s hands. It’s nearly impossible to piece together the ins and outs of the relationhship, but it’s probably for the best that we never do. These mere hints of love (or friendship) provide just enough grounding to allow the record to spin off into the unreal dream worlds of imagery that are the true strengths of Fitzgerald’s writing. And all the vagueness allows us to wonder to whom excatly Fitzgerald is referring in "The Ruins" when he sings: "They said they couldn’t see your face among the ancient ruins / But give me one more morning / And i can show it to them."
To be sure, there are a few songs on Former Glory that are just a bit too packed with words and instruments. "Emma Brown" sees Fitzgaerld spitting eight-note syllables while trying to keep up with a lilting mandolin accompaniment, and the chorus tempo always seems one step away from leaving the singer in the dust.
And had the nine-minute album-closer "Someone Else’s Secrets" been recorded as a solo piece, it would have been no less gripping. If anything, the presentation would have kept the distractions of the accompaniment at a minimum (like in his live act), and put the focus back on the songwriting itself. In the end, though, it really makes little difference: it’s the writing that carries Former Glory, and with songs this great, it’s nearly impossible not to notice
