Written by: Dave Cantrell
Among the stuff that comes to us there are those things that, no matter how understatedly announced, tend in the end, due the impact they ultimately have deep inside the sinews of our consciousness, to define us, and with that quasi-philosophical aside we come to the album before us, The Space Between Us by the by-now-longstanding singer/songwriter Robert Deeble, a finely song-crafted piece of work that manages to lay the transparent atop the murmuring sonic palette of everyday life with the seeming ease and tenacity of our most clung-to poets be it the Beats the Confessionals or choose-your-movement and does so with what appears to be an inveterate ease. More to the point, for this writer, whose music roots claim among their fanatical tangle of artists and sounds that (prior to the life-changing burst of the post-punk years) grew, if somewhat twistedly, out of the American soil and lead from Dylan with his countless tendrils to (naturally) the Band to Neil Young’s (and CSNY’s) often mind opening/blowing excursions to the lively jaunt of Delaney & Bonnie to the Allman Brothers and Jackson Browne and, oh, I dunno, early Eagles and too many more to mention, The Space Between Us, with no little irony, shortens the length that arc traces from my mid-70s teens/early twenties to the still-engaged now that finds me actually entering my 70s and does so with what might be called a humble panache, claiming, as it has every right to do, that the timeless beauty of pure song will never not land in one’s heart with a Guthriean three-chords-and-the-truth fidelity. Evidence, you ask? Well, as it happens, there’s a bundle.
With “The Forest From the Tree,” we begin, appropriately enough, amid the sonorous roots of a kind of intimate Americana, one where, despite Deeble being Seattle-based and the record itself having been recorded in Cincinnati, one senses a touch (at least) of Appalachian spirit wherein the hushed joy of existence mixes with its native soil as if it were a kind of spiritual loam. As beautiful as it is unassumingly powerful, the track is suffused with a foreshadowing presence as if gently but surely whispering hints of the deeply human elements to come, such as…
“Orphan Song,” next up, exuding with a vulnerable precision the poignant fragility that, as it has for centuries, inescapably attends when love finds itself staring into the face of loss, expressed here, from the ache of the track’s pedal steel opening to the quieted collapse that ends it, with a kind of broken poet existentialism; “Not on Your Team,” addressing with a hushed clarity the stark realities of our current socio-political mess albeit in a deeply effective metaphorical manner that few songwriters seem able to do nowadays, leaving one – or at least this listener – with the image of fragile branches falling into kindling off the nation’s family tree. Next, smack in the middle of all this, all this beauty and basic human gravity, lies an instrumental entitled “Covid Moon,” pinging gently into existence before, with an expansive graduality, growing into a quiet stunner that, as mid-album breathers go, holds its own by holding our attention in a way that, say, the sudden appearance of a fawn on a hike through the forest would, breathing quietly in the center of existence and as such rather underlies the rather inextinguishable pulse that beats inside, well, inside the spaces between us.
That said, the true centerpiece-among-centerpieces here, mesmerizingly grounded, honed to the finest of fine points, may well be “Pleasure to Burn,” its lyrics possibly taking honors on an album stocked with such (the Cohenesque richness of Deeble’s words are a subtle masterclass all their own) but then, predictably in its way, final track “Boy Like Me” appears (from the lyrics of which come the album’s title), full of longing – that word again – and a glowing-in-the-light-of-dusk introspection as the singer reflects on a boyhood friendship made gone by an inevitable divergence of paths in a two-stanza segment that’s as heartbreaking as it is illuminative and deserves – in fact requires – citing:
We long for sun from an endless night
We pray for rain where our hearts ran dry.
We feel the pain of this great divide
That’s the space between us – you and I.
–
Just a boy like me, your id-eo-lo-gy
gets stuck at odds, between the dialogue.
What I call love, you call – po-li-ti-cal
where I bend the knee, you storm the Capital.
While on the one hand drilling down into TSBU‘s creative raison d’etre which, as proferred by Deeble himself, “reflects on the relationships that become frayed in a partisan era and speaks to a deeper longing for connection,” that extract also speaks with a certain concision to the overall strength of the material herein which, in turn, rather inevitably, points to the album’s four-year gestation period that saw the artist partnering not only with producer Ric Hordinski but as well a supporting cast of musicians that included the likes of bassist Victor Krauss and drummer Lacey Brown among a sterling troupe of others. But perhaps what’s most gratifying here, to both artist and listener, is the extent to which The Space Between Us works with such a seamless grace on all its levels, resulting in a record thats not just a gem but something of a necessity.
