Gordon Lightfoot – Queen City Sounds and Art

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

It’s tempting to call Bad Flamingo’s recent run of singles, and really much of its earlier output, Laurel Canyon Gothic. “Mountain Road” is crafted from delicately intricate folk rock style guitar work, strings and near whispered vocals and one hears in its sonic DNA the sensibilities and musical spirit Donovan absorbed from West Coast bands in the USA in the mid 60s before writing his own interpretation of that collective sound on his 1966 album Sunshine Superman. There are the ghosts of “Season of the Witch” haunting “Mountain Road.” But Bad Flamingo’s song seems to be another one about a partnership on the run from the enervating tendrils of mainstream society and fueled by personal myths and narratives and the romance of how the adventure of it all is exciting and the secret greatness shared between two people except that it’s precarious and the lifestyle doomed in the end. It’s a twenty-first century noir like a darker early Gordon Lightfoot song and yet another fine example of the duo’s unique and consistently engaging songwriting. Listen to “Mountain Road” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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It’s really astonishing how Bad Flamingo delivers such stylistic diversity across its prolific songwriting career. Always inventive, always incisive and creative lyrics. And “Fiddle” is no exception. Employing a simple acoustic guitar riff and narrowly executed vocals like a Laurel Canyon era song but written by Gordon Lightfoot it’s a song about opening oneself up to someone who isn’t so good for your life but who has an appeal that gets past your defenses and for a time you indulge their trespasses because there’s something about their energy you find enjoyable for the moment. The chorus lines with “right now just play me like a fiddle” suggest there is a complicity in and awareness of the manipulation to which one is allowing into your sphere but no guilt because “I wanna pin your clothes on the line, I want to pin your body under mine.” Our narrator of this story song is getting something she wants out of the situation and is willing to put up with nonsense until she’s through with it. We find out in lyric “giving you my hands, finger the middle,” surely a deft and creative turn of phrase, that even in the acceptance is a willingness to drop a fool when the time to move on arrives. Listen to “Fiddle” on Spotify and follow the talented duo of Bad Flamingo at the links provided.