Music Review: Anthony St. James, ‘Songs of Anthony St. James’
The Pennsylvania folk singer-songwriter’s debut album is a vivid collection of working-class story songs about his native state.
Anthony St. James, Songs of Anthony St. James album artwork.
I love a good story song. Not just dark murder ballads and exciting cowboy adventures and tragic love stories (though I love all of those too!). There’s another class of story song, the slice-of-life vignette type, which delves into everyday details of places and lives, usually poignantly mundane or gritty and raw. Bruce Springsteen has several great albums’ worth, as does Minnesota’s own Charlie Parr. The late, great Tom T. Hall had a keen eye for those stories.
Place is important in these songs, because the undistinguished folks who populate them are often shaped by their physical and cultural surroundings. Their struggles are universal, yet the place-specific details bring them to life more vividly. If you know the songwriter is actually connected to the area, they’re even more powerful.
So I was primed to love Anthony St. James’ semi-self-titled debut album, Songs of Anthony St. James, which came out in October on the independent label Crotalus Records. This is a record firmly ensconced in a specific area and (from certain telling details) time period in his home state of Pennsylvania. Each song is a story of another person (or couple or sometimes group) who’s struggling not only with the same travails life throws at most everyone—sickness, heartbreak, aimlessness—but also the specific and cruel struggles faced by poor and working-class people.
St. James sings in a clear, straightforward way above often sparse instrumentation, so you don’t have to strain to understand the layers of details about places and things and relationships in his songs. Which is a very good thing, because these songs are lyrically dense, unfolding like short stories, creating vivid and visceral images and feelings as you listen. Like Parr, who’s one of my favorite songwriters, St. James uses a great deal of plain-spoken, no-frills language to tell his stories, but also knows how to throw in the occasional wordplay or metaphor or unusual turn of phrase.
The same goes for the vocals and instrumentation on the record. While nearly every song strongly features St. James and an acoustic guitar, there are unexpected touches on each, and rarely do the same set of voices and instruments appear in quite the same configuration on a second track. Five guest backup singers and instruments as diverse as trumpet, piano, harmonica, electric guitar and mandolin come and go, giving each song its own unique flavor, even though all are grounded in St. James’ consistent sense of time, place and humanity. I could write an essay about each track, but I’ll just focus on a few favorites.
Anthony St. James. Photo courtesy of the artist’s website, 2021.
The album opens with “Bayard Park, 1986,” which feels like it could be a memoir of the artist’s childhood, and the title as well as rich layers of place detail set the scene for all the songs to follow:
Town was a steam train once upon a time
From the main street square to the outskirts it burned with enterprise
The industry crumbled, the factories moved on or died
Levee broke open, swept us away with the tide
The mother and father in this story are harbingers of other flawed, struggling parents and partners to follow in subsequent tracks, too, as summed up in these crushing lines: “They married for passion, stood by idly as it died / For better or worse, until the money ran dry.”
The chorus of the song also lays the groundwork for the album’s main theme:
Nostalgia’s for suckers, we gloss over the bad things
Like a late May scar won’t heal, it just hides under summer skin
Tragedy shapes us, keep it all inside
Some scars don’t heal, they’re all in for a lifetime
The next song, “Leaving on the Train,” opens with some lovely, reverb-drenched electric guitar and a fair amount of that aforementioned treacherous nostalgia for better days:
Fell hard for her coffee eyes, taste of gin on her breath
The way she laughed and held a cigarette
Crooked floors and plastic walls, a house don’t make a home
Drunk and poor, we made it all our own
But it’s all tinged with the agony of someone left behind by their love: “She used to say home was just a place or state of mind … I couldn’t bear to watch her leave, I couldn’t speak her name / When I saw her leaving on the train.” It’s cold comfort when, in his own restless travels, he sees her one day with another man, about to get on another train, and realizes he’s not the only one she’s hurt: “He had the same look on his face I had on mine that day / That I saw her leaving on the train.” The song ends with an instrumental whine that sounds a lot like a train whistle moaning as it moves away.
Anthony St. James. Photo courtesy of the artist’s website, 2021.
Another standout track, “Corner Boys,” is one of the most gritty in terms of subject matter—following a day in the life of someone sucked into a life of petty crime, mostly likely drug dealing—yet features gentle, sweet, instrumentation. An acoustic guitar is joined off and on by a slow, wistful harmonica, a lilting mandolin, and soft hand drums. It lends a melancholy, nostalgic air to the song despite its down-and-dirty details:
Keep your eyes peeled for the Crown Vic, like a roach in a crowded house
Always underfoot in the open air tryin to keep us all on the outs
Stay the course, be loose and lips tight, no time to make friends on the prowl
Later in the song, the lyrics take on a more contemplative tone: “How did we get here, is everyone born with a plastic spoon? / Do we dare dream of better days or just those we don’t make the evening news?” But the narrator soon shakes off these thoughts and gets on with business, waiting by a pay phone for his next customer: “It’s a gamble, it’s a living, never known any other kind.”
When I saw the title “Christmas Parade” in the track list, I wondered if St. James was going to throw in a song with a more rosy-tinted variety of nostalgia. Christmas-themed songs aren’t usually my thing, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it personally, but I gave it a chance. And damned if it wasn’t a Christmas miracle—it’s possibly my favorite song on the album.
“Christmas Parade” opens with the ringing of sleigh bells, which persist throughout the song, as well as some electric guitar and keyboards joining to make a choir-like effect. But the opening lines immediately signal that this is going to be a different kind of Christmas song: “Comb the couch for fresh loose change / Cradle the bottle like a newborn babe / Smoke our cigarettes in chains while we wait.”
Anthony St. James. Photo courtesy of the artist’s website, 2021.
What follows is a quietly devastating portrait of a not very happy family waiting to watch a Christmas parade go by, the three kids huddled together under one big coat. Every line is a punch in the gut. The lyrics are a little less dense than the rest of the songs, but still packed with details so precise, I found myself tearing up as the well-meaning couple sends themselves on a fateful path:
It’s hard to be not quite in love
The first year in, a baby comes
The second year, second one and we eloped
The memories of miseries pile on from there—stress, unemployment, infidelity, poverty—juxtaposed with the Christmas parade, its manufactured cheer ringing hollow:
The fire trucks they line the streets
We raise our hands to catch the sweets
Each passing year it’s getting harder to make the kids believe
Still we stand, we smile, we dream
There’s a bravery to that kind of persistence in the face of so many hardships, but it doesn’t help the broken marriage. I had a detectable lump in my throat by the time the narrator describes the current state of his relationship:
Wasn't meant to be like this
We barely talk, we never kiss
It’s hard to even reminisce on our early days
On the scale of sad Christmas songs, “Christmas Parade” is much closer to The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” than Elvis’s “Blue Christmas.” I wouldn’t necessarily play it as a holiday standard, but as a masterwork of storytelling about quiet desperation, I’d listen to it in any season.
These are just four of the 10 solid tracks on Songs of St. Anthony James. They’re not all as tragic as my four favorites—there are threads of hope and love, rehabilitation and community on a few of them—but neither is there any sugar-coating of life’s hardships for the working class. However, there’s a listenable, upbeat quality to the album, enough instrumental and vocal surprises to keep it dynamic, and a feeling that attention is being paid in an important, perceptive way.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
