Legendary blues and folk musician PK Dwyer’s musical journey – a bright, boundary-pushing, and creatively bountiful path beginning in the 1970s – has come to an end. Today, we mark the recent passing of such an esteemed creator and ebullient busker, such an influence on his local Seattle stomping grounds, and not surprisingly, upon the proto-folk flourishings of New York and authentic artist-starved audiences in Europe. However, this music, this life-long commitment to soul-spilling song, lives on, and does so with his latest and final release, the album Loud and Clear.
Today, we listen to PK Dwyer’s final collection of new and inspiring works. Today, we’ll don our favorite, erratically stickered headphones and share the highlights of PK Dwyer’s musically moving epitaph.
Listening, and talking about it (i.e., hitting the highlights).
Loud and Clear begins with “The End of Time (Parts 1 & 2).” It’s hard-picking acoustic guitar, PK Dwyer’s gravelly voice weighted with a thoroughly lived and impenitent life, and signaling harmonica puffs responding from a bustling street corner. It’s PK Dwyer reveling in what we know and love: his unvarnished and immediately identifiable PK Dwyer-ness.
“Federal Way” is deep, knee-bouncing blues with train-engine-hooting harmonica. The guitar’s sliding lower notes paint a casual despair, and quick, shimmering slides upward imply briefly chaotic but resonant revelations. It’s a soundtrack for travels across state lines, marked by countless pit stops on couches, and including only one change of clothes stuffed into the tiny extra pocket of a hastily stitched – and frustratingly restitched – guitar case.
“The Ode” features surprisingly clean guitar strumming embracing its own glossy, harmonica-like quality. It’s a quick proclamation; a brief prayer of thanks and acceptance.
“Half-Naked Woman” is back to the trotting blues and brief sliding sparkles. With a multi-track harmony that bends and nays like a train whistle, “Half-Naked Woman” speaks to persistence through comical resistance.
“You Pulled the World Out from Under Me” is a bit country, a bit gospel, as it tells the tale of surprising heartbreak from a supposedly dependable partner:
“You always said, ‘thank you for choosin’ me,’ but in the end, you didn’t mind losin’ me.” And with words like these, PK Dwyer warns of the unpredictable feelings secretly harbored by those we depend on the most.
Album closer “Wish I Was in Paris” is a brighter number imagining a return to something memorable, something perhaps better, but changed and no longer the source of such comforting nostalgia. With glancing, percussive slides and accompanying dancing harmonica, “Wish I Was in Paris” is brief, but maintains a lingering tug on escapist heartstrings.
But is it good?
Loud and Clear is good; it’s real; it’s what you expect but can never get enough of. It’s PK Dwyer testifying to hardship, to struggle, to the rough and tumble street-planted troubadour to the oblivious coin-rolling masters in the sky. It’s music for trodding through ankle-high mud and repairing splitting hearts with duct tape and wooden screws. It’s pain, it’s joy – but with the expectation of pain. It’s the blues, it’s folk, and it’s for and by the everyman. It’s the music of PK Dwyer, and it’s tenaciously immortal regardless of the body’s dependable mortality. Recommended, legendary, and built to last beyond a body’s precarious warranty.
—-
BELOW: Listen to PK Dwyer and check him out on Spotify, Bandcamp, and Apple Music. Please support the historic works of PK Dwyer by visiting his website and playing, downloading, and/or purchasing his music. And, as always, thank you for supporting real music.
(Want to have your music reviewed on The Ark of Music? Click HERE.)
Follow, stream, download & connect with PK DWYER online:
