Canadian singer/songwriter Jason Collett, a sometime member of the collective Broken Social Scene, has crafted a patchwork quilt of a solo album that takes a musical square from the easy, breezy rock of The Band, shores it up with some of the folky phrasings of Bob Dylan, and adds in a bit of his own stylistic grit to create a lovingly crafted tribute to the beginnings of folk rock. It's obvious that Collett feels a kinship with the beatniks and his northern musical brethren by the disc's almost stubborn foothold in the sounds of yesteryear, most notably 1960s pre-psychedelia.
With fellow musician Howie Beck on board as a producer, BSS front man Kevin Drew, and Apostle of Hustle, among others, offering assistance, Here's to Being Here remains, surprisingly, a stripped-down affair that cuts right to the bleeding-heart core of the album, relying only on Collett's twang and some gentle accompaniment to keep things moving along. The album's opening track, "Roll On Oblivion," has the singer channeling young Dylan's nasal folk-rock twang and skewed knack for songwriting rules with lyrics like "no need to get philosophic." "Out of Time," with its mention of a "rainy day highway," also recalls poet Bob, but there are also shades of Broken Social Scene's joie de vivre that come peaking through like sunbeams parting the clouds.
Jason Collett has always had an easy way of painting places and characters with words, and he continues here on a gently rocking song called "Through the Night These Days" where "the stars came unglued and the skies fell in" and the heart-on-the-sleeve lament “Henry’s Song.” The down-and-out story of a hopeless romantic, "drunk on the blood of love" who "always went for the Madonna who was some kind of whore" is probably the one track where Collett steps out from behind his folk heroes to let his own light shine.
The album would be more appropriately titled Here's To Being Back There but there are more than enough reasons to be glad that it's here.
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