Music Review: Dan Rumsey, ‘Flowers On A Lamp Pole’
The St. Paul songwriter writes for a better world in his latest star-studded offering.
Dan Rumsey, Flowers On A Lamp Pole album artwork.
I’ve long loved Dan Rumsey’s songwriting. He has this knack for weaving together the threads of melody, lyric, and the sonic landscape to create a world of justice, hope, and tolerance. It’s a world I love climbing into. It’s a world I hope comes to fruition with help from Dan Rumsey’s songs.
If you look at the performance schedule Rumsey keeps, you quickly see that he goes to the people. Whether at markets, festivals, or house concerts, he’s playing music where the people are. As a solo performer, with Uncle Dan’s String Band, or as a duo with Backbeat Harris, Dan brings them his vision of what could be. The same goes for his latest offering, Flowers On A Lamp Pole, released in October 2024. In this collection of songs, Rumsey speaks right to the listener, right to a broken world, meeting us where we currently are.
“Have you ever made a mountain / have you ever made a tree?” he sings on “Dust and Darkness.” This track is anchored by a captivating groove, with a rhythm that feels like an invitation. Minneapolis legend Greg Schutte, who recorded and produced the album, moves easily from a heavy, crisp attack on the snare to highlight and elevate Dan’s hard stops on the song’s signature electric guitar lick, to whispery and ethereal on the voodoo outro that ushers the song back into the broken night.
Rumsey always surprises with the range of his writing as well as the range of instruments over which he holds mastery. In “Thirteen Lives,” a dreamy and dead-on piano solo moves us closer to the jazz realm in the most unassuming and beautiful of ways. It’s a gorgeous highlight in an album filled with magnetic and heart-stopping moments. Another is the breakdown in “Thirteen Lives.” As the instruments fall away to simple electric guitar, Rumsey repeats in a broken voice, “When you coming home my son?”
As the phrase repeats all alone in space and time, you remember the context of a Minneapolis songwriter who is writing in a city where George Floyd was murdered, in a country where sons are killed for the color of their skin, where loss occurs in our classrooms, and the gravity of our current situation strikes you. These songs, this album, this writer sends longing for a better world out into the world, knowing exactly the chasms that separate us, and knowing what is at stake for all of us. “Thirteen Lives” ends with the line “We can’t wait another day” sung as a choir of voices (including Twin Cities phenom Sarah Morris) builds behind Rumsey’s cry for rescue, and it becomes a choral prayer.
Dan Rumsey. Photo credit: David Tanner.
The title track repeatedly crosses the border between blues and soul music. It is a lament (“another soul done gone”) and a holy moment. Rumsey’s vocal bends, twists, and rising melodies feel right at home against Toby Lee Marshall’s stunning B3 and Wurlitzer organ work. The juxtaposition of the timbre of vocals against the gospel warble of the keyboards reminds us that there’s no way to completely know what lies in someone else’s heart or in the thinking behind anyone’s decisions. Their departure leaves us wanting, a lack of something which we desperately need to achieve this life’s promise.
Flowers On A Lamp Pole is a mile marker of evolution. Rumsey’s sense of groove and genre-bending variety have always made his work multifaceted and fascinating. This album is another step forward: sophisticated and accessible, gentle and astute, honest—and a challenge to us as human beings. He gives listeners a vision of what the world could be; an aural reminder of what we, as a people, are capable of creating.
Minneapolis songwriter Matthew French has said “We can be us in our songwriting.” That feels especially appropriate while listening to Flowers On A Lamp Pole. Dan Rumsey’s songs reveal a depth of kindness, love, and a songwriter seeking justice in our world—in our time—for everyone. This record is an invitation to “be the light,” as Rumsey sings in “Thirteen Lives.” The listener comes away from the album knowing the beating heart of Dan Rumsey, because we can hear it in his songwriting, and we’re all the better for the knowing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doyle Turner. Photo credit: no_aesthetic_stills.
Doyle Turner loves words. Whether it is shaping syllables into songs, poems, early morning journals, handwritten thank yous, lists, or album reviews, he is in a deep and abiding relationship with his college-ruled paper, Uniball Signo 207 .7mm pens, and mostly his keyboard. A good day is spent taking pictures, mailing things, making the words convey the precise meaning, driving, and singing.
