Description
Label Review.
2020 album. Singer songwriter. Also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf is becoming one of the most important songwriters of his generation. His songs are tuneful vignettes of small moments and big hearts. Few artists are storytellers as deft and disarmingly observational as Andy Shauf. The Toronto-based, Saskatchewan-raised musician's songs unfold like short fiction: they're densely layered with colourful characters and a rich emotional depth.
On his latest, ‘The Neon Skyline’, Shauf intertwines stories of a group of friends who frequent a local dive bar, and through them, makes poignant observations about human nature with a novelist’s detail and melancholic humour. The songwriting is down to earth, yet sophisticated and inventively melodic. ‘The Neon Skyline’ is a creative leap for this already acclaimed artist.
For ‘The Neon Skyline’, Shauf chose to start each composition on guitar instead of his usual piano. He says, "I wanted to be able to sit down and play each song with just a guitar without having to rely on some sort of a clever arrangement to make it whole." The resulting album finds its immediacy in simplicity. Like he's done throughout his career, Shauf wrote, performed, arranged, and produced every song on ‘The Neon Skyline’, this time at his new studio space in the west end of Toronto. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Shauf ended up with almost 50 songs all about the same night at the bar. Though paring down his massive body of work to a single album's worth of material was a challenge for Shauf, the final tracklist is seamless and fully-formed.
Tracklisting: Neon Skyline / Where Are You Judy / Clove Cigarette / Thirteen Hours / Things I Do / Living Room / Dust Kids / The Moon / Try Again / Fire Truck / Changer