Written by: Alex Green

“You won’t open your heart,” sings Matthew Puckett on his new album Five Dreams Of Being, “and I can’t get mine closed.”

Ah, the dilemmas of unrequited love, and no one is better than Puckett when it comes to reporting on such romantic matters.  But Puckett’s greatest strength as songwriter is in a single phrase he can sum up what’s wrong and what’s right and make them both sound equally heartbreaking.  On Five Dreams Of Being, amorous frustrations and successes are abound, and armed with an acoustic guitar, and a smooth, lovely delivery, Puckett’s songs are gently rolling revelations about the things that happen between two people who are in love, or falling out of it.

A ten-song collection of largely acoustic tracks, Five Dreams Of Being summons everyone from Nick Drake to Jack Johnson. “Come Here Honey,” which is buoyed by a backbeat of handclaps has a quiet elegance; “Climbing High” is a lush, dreamy number of recollected beauty, while the piano-tinged “Cover Your Head” plainly showcases Puckett’s smooth croon. The halfway point inclusion of Prince’s “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man,” which was given a sizzling, but ironic treatment by the Goo Goo Dolls years ago, could be campy fun, but Puckett gets inside the song, finds its emotional center and turns it—to borrow from Saul Bellow—into an open wound of a number, loaded with melancholic resignation and palpable longing.

What makes Puckett so appealing is his finesse—his voice has unmistakable touch and balance and on numbers like “Blueberries” which is a meditation on his daughter and fatherhood, he coasts along with heart-tugging accuracy.