Music Review: Eric Harrison, ‘Good Intentions’
The New Jersey-based Americana artist has fun paying homage to his influences while staying true to his heartfelt vision on a new EP.
Eric Harrison Good Intentions album artwork, 2021.
Eric Harrison’s been making music since 1988 (with a 10-year hiatus in the early 2000s). So it’s only natural that when his 2020 plans were scotched by a certain viral disease that shall remain nameless, he turned to hosting weekly acoustic shows from his front porch in New Jersey—and writing songs. He’s been releasing singles in a slow drip over the past few months, and collected them in an EP, Good Intentions, out today.
First and foremost, this record is a fun listen. Harrison knows how to put together a song with a melody and instrumentation that pull you along effortlessly—not surprising, since he has more than three decades and several albums’ worth of music under his belt. His practiced voice draws you in, too—soft and expressive but with a kind of thin wire of edge to it that gives it depth and gravitas as well. He’s somewhere on the spectrum of Elvis Costello, Neil Diamond and maybe a touch of Cat Stevens—a very listenable company of voices to belong to!
He’s not shy about citing his influences in describing these songs. I get the sense that he took lockdown as a time to really connect with and explore the styles of artists he admires, and the result is a playful, infectious set of songs that are a pleasure to listen to.
With inspirations as diverse as Dusty Springfield and Tom Petty—which sometimes meet in the middle with a kind of jangle-pop Gin Blossoms result—this brief EP takes on both the world’s troubles and everyday relationship struggles with passionate energy—but also with a gentleness and compassion that expresses a belief in a fundamental potential for goodness in humanity.
Eric Harrison. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Harrison’s empathy and keen observation of human behavior shines when he describes the pitfalls of attraction and infatuation—the complications of mismatched desire, of time diminishing fascination, of life getting in the way of love.
In “Melody,” the narrator admires a woman across the room, while ruefully acknowledging the slim chance he has with her: “From the curl of your lip to the curve of your hip / Lies a distance all too clear / I see where I stand from your point of view / And the truth is far from kind.” Nevertheless, he gamely attempts to break through her indifference and make an impression with his music: “one day I will find / A melody to make you mine.”
“Good Intentions” chronicles a relationship that was fraught with uncertainty from the beginning: “I grabbed your hand / Though you had your doubt.” The lovestruck narrator attempts to make it work, all the while recognizing (perhaps in retrospect) that it wasn’t meant to be: “Fated love such a treasure / Every step was a desperate measure / All the pain, half the pleasure / Here to serve, honey, at your leisure / Till it’s over.” But even so, there’s a refreshing gratitude for an experience that didn’t work out: “The best was better than the worst was bad,” the chorus repeats.
“Astor Place” also seems to be about a relationship that’s foundered. The dreamy instrumentation and melody, which remind me of Burt Bacharach—Harrison describes it as “the Dusty Springfield song I’ve wanted to write”—accompany evocative lyrics that bathe memories of the past in a warm nostalgic glow:
Incense would burn for us
Thought I smelled it on the bus
On my way downtown just yesterday
Storefronts aglow and clean
Different now but somehow I see
Bits of you and me along the way
Alas, the world’s encroached on those heady times: “Now they're selling poetry / To a company of lawyers.” Nevertheless, the memories are “a dream that time would not erase.”
Eric Harrison. Photo courtesy of the artist’s website.
In the other two songs of the record, Harrison moves from the interpersonal to address broader issues. He has a way of bringing across anger and despair about injustice and brutality, while hinting at the hope that people working together will change things.
“Relay Road” was written after COVID-19 took two of Harrison’s musical idols, John Prine and Adam Schlesinger, and it speaks to the feelings of anger, grief and despair that dominated much of 2020 for many of us, with a not-very-veiled reference to a man who was the source of many of our problems:
Everyone's divided and nobody's sincere
Least of all the one we chose to take the wheel and steer
Step aside the king has come undone
Returning favors to his son
And now our heroes all are dead or dying
With voices in our ear "don't bother trying"
Despite its gloomy beginning, the song soon becomes a rousing anthem, reflecting Harrison’s epiphany that, as he puts it in his press kit, “If this life is a race, it’s less a solo marathon than a team relay,” and heroes like Prine and Schlesinger have passed the baton to living musicians to keep spreading humanity and truth:
We must go
To Relay Road
Where a friend is a fighter
A rock and roll igniter
We got a creed and we got a code
Pay it back to the ones before us
Light a verse
Explode a chorus
In the more introspective track “The Fundament,” each verse recounts a different tale of suffering in imagery just vague and ominous enough to spark helpless worry for the unidentified subjects (“Is daddy coming home? / There’s a warning of violence at the station,” one verse begins. Another: “Breath of mortar and tear gas, shuffling at the door…”)
The chorus revolves around a call for “Men and women of good intent” to gather at “the fundament,” which I took to be the foundation of who we are as human beings. The just-this-side-of-spiritual imagery evokes a longing to find a way to come together and cleanse our world of the many evils that plague us and threaten our very existence. While seemingly out of reach, the sentiment is poignant and strangely inspiring, something I’ve thought about more than once since listening to the lyrics.
Harrison says his next EP will have a more traditional country feel, in tribute to John Prine, and I can’t wait to hear that voice and those songwriting skills applied to a more explicitly Americana sound. But, even though this EP isn’t my usual style, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Whether you come for the irresistible folk-pop sound and Harrison’s appealing vocals, or for the gentle but insightful and incisive lyrics, Good Intentions has something for just about everyone.
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!
