Davidson, Ethan Daniel

Davidson, Ethan Daniel

Cordelia

Blue Arrow

Ethan Daniel Davidson’s thirteenth studio album finds the veteran singer-songwriter exploring new creative territory while continuing down the beguiling and wondrous road that his discography has charted thus far. Cordelia is as lush and deeply felt as Davidson’s music has ever been, with countrified balladry and unvarnished blues accompanying this journeyman’s philosophical explorations and ruminations on his past, present, and future.  Cordelia follows 2022’s Stranger, which marked both a conclusion and a new beginning after a decade-plus of fruitful creative collaboration with Warren Defever of experimental rock legends His Name Is Alive (who Davidson is continuing to collaborate with on future projects as well). “I was overdue to start all over again with a bunch of new people,” he explains. But sometimes a change of scenery is needed for a spell, and so as Davidson was armed with an array of songs he had in his arsenal largely from a COVID-era songwriting span (the aching “Your Old Key” dating back more than a decade in terms of creative conception), he reached out to producer David Katznelson for some ideas on who to work with, who in turn recommended North Mississippi Allstars frontman Luther Dickinson as the perfect co-producer alongside Katznelson. Davidson headed down south to link up with the North Mississippi Allstars frontman to shape the seven songs that became Cordelia—a collection that takes a left-turn from the darkly shaded textures of Stranger and was sonically inspired by Davidson’s love for the raw blues records that storied label Fat Possum were releasing in the 1090s. “I’ve always been a fan...

Davidson, Ethan Daniel

Stranger

Blue Arrow

The black, streamlined Commodore Vanderbilt Hudson locomotive emerges from the long tunnel of memory and circles endlessly on the three-rail track of nostalgia. The rails glisten in the rain, the throbbing engine brushes gobbets of water from overhanging branches and hunkers down with a low-pitched whining groan. Sparks sputter from under the wheels in a blue-and-white arc of recall. The long, majestic iron horse rushes down the straightaway against the wall of the house we lived in when we were 10, whistling and chugging bravely. “I’ve ridden on a lot of trains,” says Ethan Daniel Davidson, a native Michigander. “To jump on one, you try to be sure you can see each bolt. Once they all start to blend together, the train is going too fast to jump on. I’m too old to jump on trains now, but I can still write about them.” On “Stranger”, his most poignant ballad is the quivering, shuddering “My Train Got Lost”. The title comes from an anthem by a Minnesota troubadour who has written dozens of songs about the coming and going of coachmen, station masters, tramps walking along the rails, conductors, steam whistles, railroad men, railroad gin and railroad tracks. Other tracks of recorded sound on “Stranger” owe debts to Public Image Ltd. (the post-punk “Even Bad Seeds”), The Band (the prophetic “There was a Famine in the House of Bread”) and Echo & The Bunnymen (the existential “My Jail”). Of the folk music staple “Dink’s Song”, Davidson says, “It’s pretty self-explanatory:...