reviews

“Dan Edmonds Good Fortune Assembly is one of my favorite releases of 2021. I discovered the Canadian artist last year with his record Softie and fell in love. I knew whatever he did in the future would be worth keeping an out out for and I was not disappointed at all.

The Good Fortune Assembly is an album about regret, fear, and loss, and ultimately, growth and moving on. The song ” I Wish I Could Be Open” is about, well wishing you can be open with someone, but being too afraid to. The Morning is the most important track on this record, this song might be my favorite song of the year. This song paints a picture of a breakup from two perspectives, it’s about a relationship that was supposed to last forever but didn’t. It also finishes off with an incredible saxophone solo.

The album transitions from feelings of regret to feeling of growth and change with the Lessen Learned interlude. unfortunately the songs after the interlude are just okay to me, they have a really nice vibe to them and keep the spirit of the album alive, however I really connect with the first portion of the record which makes up most of the run time.

This album is a must listen as Dan Edmonds is the most underrated artist alive.”

~ EverChanging, albumoftheyear.org

“Back in Canada for another treasure from the February 26 release vault. Former Harlan Pepper Dan Edmonds released a new charming solo album Good Fortune Assembly. The song The Morning is just pure gold. Dan Edmonds, Luka Kuplowsky and Caitlin Woelfle-O’Brien create some magic together there and the music video is also excellent.”

~ onechord.net

“Dan Edmonds does what many of us are too afraid to do: he tries new things.

As part of the now-defunct Hamilton band Harlan Pepper, he first made largely banjo-centric folk songs (it was the early 2010s after all) and, as the band developed, vintage rock n’ roll. On his first solo record, 2016’s Ladies on the Corner, Edmonds tied-dyed his lo-fi folk songs. Now, on his latest solo album Softie, Edmonds mostly leaves his acoustic guitar in the case and turns to the keyboard to make…light pop music?

Softie sounds like what a velvet tracksuit feels like: cozy as hell. With a pair of heavyweights by his side (Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh produced the record and The National’s Bryan Devendorf plays drums on a handful of songs), Edmonds, often with love on his mind, creates rich and playful pop songs primarily inspired by the works of Burt Bacharach and Randy Newman. In the press material, Edmonds also cites hip-hop and rap acts like Gang Starr and MF Doom as influences which really shines through on “Reprise” as Benita Whyte softly raps verses over Edmonds’ piano-based groove.

With all of the album’s ten songs clocking in at under three minutes, Edmonds doesn’t spend much time lingering on a vibe. The title track starts off with delicate instrumental touches highlighted by a flute that mirrors “the movement of water,” as Edmonds describes. Half-way through the song, the instrumentals briefly clear out except for bright piano trills and an electronic beat, but then in burst a choir of horns, ushering in a whole new celebratory mood.

Edmonds extends this approach to his lyrics as well. Each song feels like being dropped into Edmonds’ brain mid-thought. In fact, as seen in the lyrics on Bandcamp, the final verse of most songs ends with a comma. Take “Three O’clock, Paris,” the album highlight, which finds Edmonds stumbling down the city’s streets enraptured by a woman: “She’s beyond, Mona Lisa, and over the Berlin Wall,” he sings, trailing off. The lyricism of “Fell in Love,” in turn feels like a purposeful closing statement. On the album’s longest track (by one second but still), Edmonds croons, “oh my woman is never wrong, she deserves a long song”. Later, right before a funky sequence that sounds like it was taken from a 1970s game show closes out the track, he sings, period included, “I’m scared to death, someday I may have no love left.”

Given Edmonds’ track record, Softie’s sonic shift feels out of left field on paper. But confidence is deeply rooted in trying something new and Edmonds has a lot of it on Softie which lets him pull it off with ease.”

~ Laura Stanley, dominionated.ca

“I think of my father, almost eighty years old. He still moves like a child, his heart is pure” Dan Edmonds sings in the title track of his sophomore album softie. The album is warm and it feels safe as if Dan himself is inviting us into a world in which anxieties fade. The album carries a very distinct sound throughout the whole record, and yet every song brings a lot to the table, From the slow ballad Mother to the late-night walk on Three O’clock, Paris.

The album is very self-aware on what the best track of the album is. The title track Softie is the shooting star of the record. The song itself encapsulates the entire feeling of the album and packages it into a nostalgic and introspective groove. The first half of the song is a love song with lyrics that reflect on the fragility of life, but yet celebrate it as life is something to be celebrated. Like his elderly father, Dan reflects on his own life and wants to not regret mistakes like his father. The second half of the song is an arrangement of horns creating an unforgettable melody. This is the part of the song that will bring listeners back for more. Even the album came back for more as a reprise of this song appears in the back half, one that doesn’t have an epic sax solo but one that features Benita Whyte for the more laid-back version of the song.

The album itself reflects a whole year of Dan’s life as revealed in an interview with Two Story Melody. The thoughts, feelings going on in his life and were packaged into this record. The album’s lyrical content is very uplifting, to make for a very easy listen. The only thing difficult about the record is to label its genre. It keeps Dan Edmonds’s indie-folk foundation as a base for the tracks but this album is by no means a folk record. It incorporates elements of chillwave, lounge, and indie rock to make something similar to FKJ if he had a folk background.

Dan Edmonds Softie is a near-perfect record, with fantastic production, incredible musical performances, and excellent vocal performances. The only issue this record faces is the short run time it has at 25 minutes. I wish I could live in the carefree world of Softie for more than 25 minutes at a time, but alas, a good thing never lasts forever. – J

Best Track: Softie
Worst Track: (There aren’t any bad songs on this record)
Rating: 9.5/10

~ Applejack, albumoftheyear.org

While he’s made HMN many a time over the last decade, Dan Edmonds returns with his first album in three year that showcases a decidedly different new musical direction. Edmonds’ solo debut mined the likes of Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground and maybe Simply Saucer but Edmonds’ sophomore Softie is more about impressionistic pop influenced by the likes of Burt Bacharach.

“Everyone really likes that record and we sold out our first pressing of vinyl and we toured across Canada with Ladies On The Corner, recalls Edmonds. “But it took some time to figure out the next step. I’m always working and writing but this project we took our time and we revised the music as much as we could to create a different vibe from the first record. I didn’t want to do guitar music. I wanted to try keyboards and synthesizers and try the exact opposite of my first album.

Recording with former Hamiltonian, producer Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck, Alvvays, Sam Roberts) I bring up a scene from a classic comedy from yesteryear and it seems a touchstone with Edmonds. We both were struck when Elvis Costello walked into an Austin Powers movie to sing a Burt Bacharach tune — everyone knows Bacharach although indie rock hasn’t really embraced such an influence. For Edmonds, it became a muse to follow for his latest musical outing.

“It was really interesting experience hearing Burt Bacharach’s music before actually knowing it’s him — like in that Austin Powers movie when I was like twelve years old,” says Edmonds. “Funny, someone gave me a Burt Bacharach record called Reach Out and it almost plays like a greatest hits album. Every song I’d heard before and the instrumentation, the arrangements, the songs themselves — he’s sort of like a top tier artist that someone can really aspire to but it’s almost unattainable how good his songs are. I was trying to figure out what makes his songs so good and it’s the sort of music you can listen to in the morning and it’s not too heavy. I was trying to make music that you could put on in the morning and it wouldn’t be too abrasive.

“I was also drawing inspiration from painting a little more,” adds Edmonds. “I always considered art school as a kid but that didn’t pan out as I was more drawn to music. I went to see a Paul Klee exhibit in Ottawa and it was really inspiring and I got back into painting a little bit. I’m not sure how much it informed the music but just on that level of experience.”

So with these influences, Edmonds would start his journey into impressionistic pop. While songs may stretch back some three years, others were recorded as recently as days before the final mastering of the album. Overall, Edmonds and Walsh worked fluidly on riffs, textures and a vibe for a song to come up with an organic track at the end of the process and result in succinct, three minute vignettes of what could be called breezy yacht rock in the vein of Steely Dan, Christopher Cross or the band Looking Glass that a new generation learned about from the Guardians of Galaxy film soundtrack. Early on in the process, one of the first songs the pair worked on seemed to sum up the theme for the album and became its title, Softie.

“It was the first or second day when we came up with Softie,” says Edmonds. “The last half is just an instrumental that you could sample and loop. It informed the album as it was weird and surreal and that was the vibe we chased the rest of the way. We would work in chunks for a week and then I would take all the music and bring it to Hamilton for three months and then we would meet up after we’d both do some work on it and we slowly built up the music. I was bringing new songs each time we met up. It wasn’t recorded in two days but a little longer of a process. It was a learning experience because I’ve engineered and produced bands but working with Graham was a learning experience. He’s very patient and we worked in ways I’ve never worked before. We co–produced the album because he bounced ideas off of me and I was bouncing ideas off of him. He worked out arrangements and I did as well. It was like a sounding board to bounce ideas off of and it becomes much stronger when you can collaborate with people like that.

“People’s attention spans are shorter and we wanted to have the album move quickly,” he adds on the three minute songs. “It’s also about catching people off guard, making sure every song was different but they all worked together in some way. We wanted to be very concise and keep it exciting. We wanted to be as orchestral as possible and stretch into areas we hadn’t gone before. Lots of horns, percussion, Wurlitzer keyboards and we tried to make things more complex. I love Steely Dan although I’m not to up on yacht rock as a genre. I listened to “Gaucho” a lot over the last two years. It’s really interesting and exciting music so yacht rock is great although I don’t think I’m there yet with regard to the complexity of the music.”
Whatever name critics will ascribe to it, Edmonds has a solid group of songs that showcase his a new palette of sounds but with the same craftsmanship he’s always had. Excited for the future, this weekend Dan Edmonds offers a hometown showcase of the new music and more.

“We’ll be playing a lot of Softie as well as some old and new songs to play at this show as well,” says Edmonds. “I’ve been rekindling my love of folk music again so I couldn’t say what my next album will sound like. I’m just super grateful to be putting out this music — it’s a joy to be working and be able to play shows. The recording of this album wasn’t about challenging an audience but more so challenging myself. I’d never made music like this before and it was very exciting. I hope it’s easily digestible. It’s different from my past music but I hope it’s still enjoyable.”

~ Ric Taylor, ViewMag.com

After stepping out solo with Ladies on the Corner in 2016, ex-Harlan Pepper frontman Dan Edmonds has shared details of a sophomore follow-up.

Edmonds will deliver new album Softie on November 22. Ten tracks in length, he describes the effort as “an exploration of more ambitious sonic landscapes and grooves” that he co-produced alongside Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh.

“Softie was inspired by the art and music that I was consuming at that time,” Edmonds explained in a statement. “Paul Klee’s paintings — his use of colour and form — had a profound influence on me during the recording of this project. The feeling I have when seeing abstract expressionism is one that I’m still attempting to translate into song. I was also listening to quite a bit of hip-hop during this time, specifically Gang Starr and MF DOOM.”

Alongside the announcement, Edmonds has shared album opener “two thirds of a fifth,” which arrives alongside a John Smith-directed video. As Edmonds tells it, the song is “an internal dialogue about trying to overcome anxiety with compassion” that was written before the first recording session for the album.

~ Calum Slingerland