Simon Scardanelli

Reviewed by Mike Davies - Folking.com
Born in London and based in Brittany, Underneath The Singing Tree is Scardanelli’s ninth solo album and, a cocktail of heady pop, folk and jazz, one of his strongest. Opening with a swirling Eastern flavour and featuring Sophie Caudin on flute, the title track is a cautionary tale about being so beguiled by thoughts of love that and the promises of a future unknown (“you called me with those deep brown eyes/Said come with me and we can one”) that you don’t see the red flags (“Well it was sweet first and I held you close/I never thought that you’d ever leave … as you kissed me I should have heard that sound cos someone started ringing a bell…now I see the devil in your eye”).
The laid back, slightly jazzed dreamy mood set by Simon Plane’s trumpet, the steady chugging ‘Young And Curious’ speaks to the familiar feeling of wanting to know if the person you broke up with still thinks of you (“There’s got to be a way to find out if you’re missing me/Without giving away the secrets of my soul/I’m not looking for your attention or your sympathy/It’s just a passing thought”)  but is more actually about the way time brings relationship changes (“I never really understood why I stopped loving you/I guess things just happen when you look the other way… we were walking through the fields in a fantasy of make believe/How could we know this innocence would go so soon”) and the regrets that still linger  (“I never took the time to tell you that you’re beautiful/And I never took the time to say don’t walk away”).
Again with trumpet (more of a fairground  feel here) and plucked out on what sounds like ukulele, ‘Here We Go Again’ is a light on its feet reflection on always making the same mistakes in love (“I don’t know why these things keep happening to me/I thought I’d learned a lesson or two but apparently/To break the cycle of love and loss is a fantasy”), a theme carried over into the near six minutes tumblingly fingerpicked ‘Five Seconds Ago Last Year’ (“The table that I set for you has gone/Paints and paper hearts now bleed for one/Who never stood a chance it was decided -Out of my hands/All change – make other plans that do not include me”).
More musically upbeat with cajon and clarinet, a jaunty cabaret groove and catchy chorus ’The Glittering Prize’  is about coming to realise you’re not the one with all the answers you thought you were when you were younger and how being focused  on the goal (“everything I ever wanted to be was wrapped up in a glittering prize”) led you to be blind to everything around you (“I was born to be wilderment’s captain/I was born to be chaos theory‘s muse/I was born to be beguiled and uncertain/It’s no surprise that I was born to be confused”), confessing “now I know that it’s smarter to be dumb/and the clever guys are keeping schtum…and every clever song you thought that I wrote/is just a load of words on play”.
Later this year, he’s hoping to release his new folk-opera, La Mer,  for which, led by a repeated mandolin riff, clanking percussion and with a stronger traditional folk flavour , building in intensity, ‘Battle Ships’ serves as a taster set, as the title suggests, in time of war (“let’s blood this sea red we’ll hunt down these cold men ‘o war ’til the devil’s dead!”).
It’s back to matters of the heart for the quieter acoustic fingerpicked ‘Everything Is Going To Be Fine’, this time of a more optimistic persuasion (“We each have got our stories – all our victories and our failures too/and somewhere in the middle where we meet there’s a place to be true/I can make a masterpiece – a work of art – if you/Lend me your perfection and just one tiny piece of your heart”)  while not expecting the world (“We can talk all night about how we shouldn’t plan for love/And taking it one day at a time – well that’ll work for us”) because “you and I know better than that/that would be like making plans/And we said we would never do that”.
Caudin back on flute, ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ is, as the title implies, another fleet of musical foot number, caught up in the simple joy of terpsichorean abandon (“There’s nowhere that I’d rather be/Than locked arm in arm to a tune in three…Let us go dancing and jive ’til our clothes are a mess/I’m no John Travolta but really I couldn’t care less/I’ll put on my best shiny boots/And glide round the dance floor in Cuban hoops”), making up for a serious-minded youth (“When I was young I never had fun/On the dance floor I wore a red face
Now I’m all grown up and depending on luck!- I intend to grow old in disgrace)” as it waltzes into moves of a more carnal nature (“when we’re done dancing exhausted we’ll/Slide into bed/But never too weary to dance with our fingers instead/Exploring the moves we forgot/To try on the dance floor”).
The buoyancy doesn’t last though, opening with flute, the acoustic guitar-based ruminative ‘Driftwood’ with its descending scales returns to a desolate emotional landscape as it sketches a brief ships in the night liaison (“I’m not your lover or your golden boy/That honour lies beside a better man/I’m just like driftwood on a foreign shore/Good enough to light a fire after dark, or when the tides are low/or sing a moonlit rhyme on sinking sand/All trace of us will soon be washed away”). It ends with the (autobiographical) confession of  the intricately and tumblingly picked ‘Heart Upon My Fretboard’ with a very definite Gallic air in the Paris café balladeering manner of Aznavour or Gainsbourg  and, as you’d expect, musical imagery (“I’ve always worn my heart upon my fretboard/And you can see the scars all down my neck/Is there one for every love? I can’t remember/But the deepest cut’s the one I can’t forget”) and an introspective existential crisis streak (“I’ve sometimes been a man of easy virtue/a pleasure seeking thrill I can’t resist/To slide between the sheets with perfect strangers/The sex and dopamine is such a fix/And maybe that’s a substitute for something/That I’ve been searching long and hard to find/I wouldn’t say that I’ve been disappointed/But there’s always someone different in my mind)”, wrapping it up in a metaphor with “how my fingers crawled across that desert/In an endless search for perfect harmony”.  The singing tree bears some fine fruit, you should shelter a while beneath its branches.

Folking.com

We have had to wait along time for a new album from Simon Scardanelli. It’s been six long years since 2019’s The Rock, The Sea, The Rising Tide. The world was a different place back then, pre-COVID and all that. Since 2019, he has released several singles and most probably spent those lockdown years finding old projects to release and things to work on, like many of us did, to pass the time.

I know for a fact Simon has been working hard on a number of musical creations alongside this new album release. A folk opera is somewhere in the mix, another album maybe, this time with his live performing collaborator Sophie and who knows what else, all bubbling away on his musical hard drives. All that, whilst ramping up the number of his live shows around France as well. Busy busy!

So what about the new album? That’s why we’re here right?

OK, let’s get to it, I mean, after six years you must be keen to find out what he has in store for us this time. You have nothing to fear, just open your ears and prepare for a truly wonderful musical experience.

It may seem a bit simplistic, but firstly the running order of the songs is perfect. The tracks guide you through the audio journey very nicely indeed. In a world of streaming and shuffle mode, the art of sequencing songs on an album may seem a bit forgotten, but it is refreshing to listen to a well-ordered album the way the artist intended you to.

So it is an effortless listening experience made so by the crafting of the composer. Everything in the right place with variety and consideration designed to entertain.

Sonically, the whole album sparkles beautifully and is easily up to Simon’s usual excellent production standards. Crafted, lovingly and painstakingly put together. Every note, every space, every word, all must have a meaning and a reason to be there. Simon always excels at his production values, and I absolutely love the way that everything here has its own space and air to breathe and shine.

So the mix and instrumentation is perfect for each of the songs but also his voice is so strong and ageless. I have listened to all his albums through the years, going back to Big Bam Boo in the late 1980s and even his pre-pop incarnations from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Simon’s voice is stronger now than those early outings and equal to anything else he has released in the last 30 years. It is with timeless ease that he reaches each note in every song and creates unusual and thoughtful harmonies. No room for clichés with Simon.

That follows through in both the music he composes and in the lyrics that he writes. His words, as always, defy cliché and weave an imagery and a storytelling of such interest that it leaves you wondering what sort of strange events could have inspired these songs. Love is certainly one large element on show here, or maybe a doomed love, possibly a stronger emotion that an artist can draw inspiration from.

You must discover these songs yourself. Let each one unfold and delight you. I was lucky enough to hear some of these songs at a small live show. They were new to me amongst Simon’s classic back catalogue. Songs, such as the playfully sombre “Five Seconds Ago Last Year,” reached out and grabbed me. I am so glad to have it on the new album, alongside the other new and enchanting songs. There is the resigned, “Here We Go Again” and the uplifting, “Let’s Go Dancing.” Listen to “Heart Upon My Fretboard” and revel in the simile of a songwriter’s vulnerability brought to bear on the neck of his guitar on which he bares his soul. Then there is the mysterious title track, “Underneath The Singing Tree,” which paints a picture of that aforementioned doomed affair in the magical forests of Huelgoat in Brittany, France.

The song “Battle Ships,” destined for Simon’s other ongoing musical project, the folk opera La Mer, has been included in advance on this album. A firm new live show favourite, it has muscled its way onto the album on the back of its audience popularity and its overwhelming majesty. Driven by a forceful ukulele, this song shows Simon’s versatility in switching between instruments to create a broad and exciting musical landscape.

One song which may be familiar to fans of his work is “Glittering Prize.” Originally recorded during the Make Us Happy sessions in 2015, it then found itself a release as a single in 2021 (one of those lockdown projects, no doubt). Its inclusion on the new album finds it seamlessly slotting in with the other tracks. A reworking of the song, with new vocals and an enhanced mix, has elevated it beyond the original single version and will impress any who have heard it before and equally delight new listeners.

I haven’t discussed each and every one of the songs on the album, that is for you to discover, as I said earlier. However I hope that I have given you a flavour of the excellence that runs through the whole release.

This is Simon’s best album since the eternal Make Us Happy and is a great job, very well done. So many outstanding tracks make this album a resounding success and worth every minute of the wait. (3,038,400 of them, but who’s counting!) Now how long till the next album, Simon?

Geoff Wilbur Music

FOLKING.COM / Mike Davies Review

In the distant past, Scardanelli used to be Simon Tedd, one half of 80s acoustic duo Big Bam Boo, these days he’s a solo artist with four folk-inclined albums already under his belt. On The Rock, The Sea, The Rising Tide he plays everything you hear, primarily acoustic guitar, but also with shades of violin, cello, recorder, ukulele, harmonium and Turkish cumbus.

I’ll be the first to admit his voice and vocal delivery can take a little acclimatizing to, but perseverance pays off, and the songs are always worth sparing an ear. Case in point being the opener, ‘The Ballad Of Jago Trelawney’, a dramatic fingerpicked narrative, from whence comes the album title, based on the 1793 sea battle between the English and French frigates the Nymph and Cleopatre during the Napoleonic Wars and the fate of the fictional titular Cornish tin miner pressed into service.

The album remains afloat for the following three tracks, ‘The Cold Green Sea’, a fluttering guitar ballad about the suicide of an Edwardian gentlewoman fallen from grace when she becomes pregnant by her now slain soldier lover, and the quasi-operatic ‘Pearly Diving Sea’, a song of parted lovers and panning for gold.

A ruminative instrumental, ‘Becalmed’ provides a bridge to ‘Different’, a gently fingerpicked and recorder solo song basically about not learning from history that draws inspiration from the religious persecution of the Elizabethan era with its allusion to priest holes.

Edging towards the six-minute mark and recalling perhaps the late Vin Garbutt, ‘Patience’ turns the gaze inward on creative prevarication as he declares:

"Patience is a virtue that I never had time to learn
I’ve been too busy making up for lost time to wait my turn
My best foot forward means one of them drags behindand I’d be one step ahead of the game if I could only find –if I could find – the starting line"

and how “I got a novel in my head and a hundred songs kicking around, most of them will never see the light of day, but I’m much too insecure to ever throw them away”.

A particularly striking lyric set to a circling guitar with cascading vocal notes, ‘Human Nature – The Cry’ turns a cynical – or perhaps realistic – view on mankind’s apparent pre-dispostion for self-destruction through wilful ignorance. The number’s reprised, in longer ‘Lament’ form, as a slightly longer and more musically minimalist ukulele-accompanied final track.

An odd one, ‘A Simple Case Of Time’, which has echoes of early Roy Harper, seems to mingle ideas of gambling and mortality. Then, returning to recorder and introducing cumbus, ‘Star City’ opens with another note of prevarication (“I thought about living in Star City/But I just don’t get things done, no/I just never ever get done”) but then shifts into a theme of mental illness and medication, and the conclusion that the world is enough to send anyone mad.

Finally comes ‘Requiem For The City Of New York’, a downbeat metaphorical reflection of time and tide’s fading fortunes in a snapshot of one time Broadway girl and her former dancer lover, now “perched upon a barstool downtown…tobacco stains, red lipstick, and fake pearls” as the “world looks on with pity” but “no-one likes a loser so throw away, disposable and cheap”.

Now based in Brittany, he’s very much on the folk fringe, but, as the press notes observe, if your inclinations lean to the less immediate sides of Scott Walker, Tim Buckley, Vini Reilly and, I’d suggest, David Ackles, then he’s well worth seeking out.

Mike Davies

*****

The Rock, the Sea and the Rising Tide - review by James Morris.

Simon Scardanelli has a new album release on September 6th. “The Rock, the Sea and the Rising Tide”, is a mature and contemplative listen. Simon takes on the mantle of the balladeer, a story telling troubadour, regaling us with intriguing tales of high seas and adventure, darkness and human frailty, global catastrophe and personal doubt. 

This is a carefully considered body of work. Acoustically styled, guitar picked songs with a sparse balance of additional instruments. The occasional use of violin, cello, recorders and cumbus, round out each song perfectly.

There is a dark theme of human fragility through the album, it’s like a bleak but majestic windswept moor, or like standing on a wild cliff edge gazing over a brooding misty sea. You listen with suspense, transported by the haunting stories within each song. The narrative of his songs is something Simon has always taken great care with and the poetry, imagination and imagery that shines through this album, shows how much enjoyment he had in writing them.

The album opens with “The Ballad of Jago Trelawney”, the story of a Cornish tin miner summoned into navy service for his country, which ends in a tragic sea battle. Based around a fictional character, the events it describes are from an actual battle that took place in 1793 between the ships English Nymph and the French Cleopatra. It’s from the chorus of this song that the album takes its name.

The album is full of imagined and real life experiences that Simon has woven into an intriguing and rewarding musical landscape. The perils and mysteries of the ocean continue in the unfolding tales “The Cold Green Sea”, and “Pearly Diving Sea”, leading to the only instrumental in this collection. “Becalmed”, provides a moment to reflect before the wind once again whips us on to the lightly picked and beautifully haunting, “Different”, before delivering up perhaps, the most personal and introspective song on the album.

“Patience" will be the next single, released at the end of July. It steps away, for a moment, from the more enigmatic story telling and provides a more direct insight into the writers own creative world and, dare I say, insecurities. 

Next up is “Human Nature - the Cry”. “Human Nature” was the first single from the album and is a clear warning of the climate change disaster that threatens the planet we live on and the arrogant disregard a particular world leader pays to the threat. It’s a spartan and compelling listen. Complexity disguised with chameleon simplicity with a depth of thought behind every carefully chosen word and guitar phrase. 

More human vulnerability and oracular observation are brought forth in, “A Single Case of Time” and “Star City” which has quirkier feel but remains moodily within the albums sense of positive desolation.

Before we reach the albums conclusion, Simon sings touchingly and illustratively on, “Requiem for the City of New York”, which is a reflective backward glance at a city he once lived in.

Finally there is an alternate version of “Human Nature - the Lament”. It is less strident and angry than the single version. It’s sadder and more resigned and this presents the song in a very different light, which provides a fitting end to this thought provoking album.

Once again Simon has produced an album uncompromisingly his own. Different from all that has come before and no doubt from what he will do next. This is no fashion following attempt to please anyone but himself. As he sings in the song “Patience” - “Jumping on a bandwagon seems to be the next big thing”. Never so for Simon Scardanelli and in following his heart, he has made an album of bleak majesty which pulls its listener deep under crashing waves to the ethereal realm that lies beneath their cacophony. A place of quiet solemnity, where you have space to ponder and unravel these modern folk chronicles as they are spun out before you in sparse but richly delivered song.

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