GABRIEL

Release Date for single:

8 September 2021

Michael Dwyer – Review of Jack’s 2021 album ‘Gabriel’

Music, Arts & Culture Journalist writes:

Great records lie in wait. It’s a secret often overlooked in the artist’s rush to bottle the heady spirit of now. GABRIEL is testament to the power of patience, the surrender of control, and the quiet authority of songs that land in the hands of perfect strangers in their own sweet time and place.

GABRIEL came to Jack Nolan a few years ago, sat at his side on a long desert drive that he wasn’t sure he’d come back from. The song, in its own unhurried and roundabout way,
eventually found itself in Nashville, USA, on an album of the same title, an album completed
just before COVID-19 wrought its havoc on the world.

In truth, it’s hard to miss. GABRIEL is an album that mines its own carefully sculpted acoustic world with a profoundly atmospheric sense of place, and a depth of self-knowledge that speaks of arrival after a lifetime of sometimes hard, sometimes tender experience.

GABRIEL

We were on the road, from heaving LA freeways and into Death Valley, a most peculiar place, an unknown place. When your mind is elsewhere, irretrievable, like mine at the time, the valley’s a parallel universe, perdition. We were in the midst of a three-day dream. I fell upon a crossroad, landing eighty-six metres below sea level in the Californian Desert at a place, Badwater Basin, where an androgynous guardian appears, Gabriel, kind, gentle yet hard-lived and furrowed, who gave and left me with hope that all would be well.

“The original version, the demo, had that magic, which I thought about releasing it as it was, having gone into the old Damien Gerrard studio in Sydney, to bang down some ideas. I played everything, guitars, shakers, lead, the vocal and I also sang the harmonies. It worked, but my belief in the song told me to give it the environment it deserved. Arriving in Nashville I briefed producer Justin Weaver, who went about recreating the demo perfectly from the ground up. I still handled the guitars, the lead vocal and all harmonies but was smart enough to hand off the rest to the boys!’’ Listen for Jimmy Paxson on the trash can drum, swinging around the harmonies and Justin Weavers banjo, that is the optimism and the final outcome.

Credits:

Written by Jack Nolan

Recorded at ‘Welcome to 1979’ in Nashville TN 2020.
Produced by Justin Weaver
Engineered by Chris Mara.
Mixed by Chris Mara & Justin Weaver
Mastered by Ryan Smith, Sterling Sound Nashville TN.

Jack Nolan – Vocals & guitars
Justin Weaver – Electric Guitars, slide, banjo & backing vocals
Jimmy Paxson – Drums
Chris Autry – Bass