Gettin' back to the GRIT Blog with a long overdue My Half Ridden Dream review

Been outta practice fer awhile.  Work’ll do that to ya.  One day ya wake up an’ realize: Hell, work is getting’ in the way of all the important stuff!

It’s been happenin’ to me.  I’ve let all this blogging an’ whatnot slip by in favor of keepin’ in good with The Man.

Well, first things first.  I owe some way outta date music reviews, but even outta date I still got stuff to say that I want committed to print so I’m gonna go ahead an’ take care of this business anyways.

Light on in the Hallway by My Half Ridden Dream

The oldest promised musickal commentary I owe is to My Half Ridden Dream.  MHRD is the sometimes-solo project of one Thomas A. Alfera, and in the hustle an’ bustle of 2012 he released a self-produced longplay called Light on in the Hallway.  Late one night many years (possibly decades) past, LA’s Lonesome Cowboy, Jim Ladd, prefaced a playlist by sayin’ that “the next set of music makes me wish I was cruisin’ down Pacific Coast Highway in a 1967 Mustang convertible, the top down, the full moon shinin’ down, the warm summer breeze whipping by…”  I no longer remember what tunes followed that introduction… one of them may have been “LA Woman”… but it’s that specific description that the first spin of Light on in the Hallway brought back to me.

All of the songwriting credits of the new offering go to Alfera and his considerable travels with the American Experience are downright palpable in the musical an’ lyrical odyssey he shares with the listener.  At its heart, Light on in the Hallway is a tale of loves lost and found, in between, and right where you left them; a poignant spirit-quest into the eternal paradoxical co-existence of independence and loneliness and the struggle to find their balance.

The album opens with “Anna Come Home.”  It’s a melancholic memoir, but with its roots-rock forward momentum the tune gives us no option but to press on down the highway.  “Ellen’s Song” and “D.O.I.” continue a pilgrimage that never leaves us at any one roadside stop for very long, emphasizing the bittersweet fact that while our emotional grapplings may never resolve, they do sting less with the distance we can put between them and ourselves.  By the time we reach “The End of Love” and its fuzzed-out, oozing, rock bottom, the miles traveled in philosophical introspection have steadied our psyche enough that we can see around love’s tattered edges.  There is possibility up the road, and even though that possibility may still very well be simply the possibility of disappointment, “Summer Days,” “Genuine Feeling,” and “Happily Classified” affirm we must be strong enough to live through that possibility.

Musically, Light on in the Hallway is possessed of a rich adventure of American sound and vista.  Even so, the songwriter is not trapped in a cliché of the Heartland.  His travels with Americana have taken him across a varied and diverse land and My Half Ridden Dream’s final formula has been baptized in the waters of Southern California, that edge of Western Civilization.  It looks back at the familiar and forward into the unknown simultaneously.  The narrators’ adventures and influences sparkle, but they have been fashioned into a unique voice crying in that wilderness of three chords and the truth.  A voice well suited to explore that duality of cynicism and hope that is the “Light on in the Hallway.”

Hopefully you have a 1967 convertible Mustang and access to Pacific Coast Highway for this one… and if not, close your eyes and let the music take you there anyway.

You can listen to and possess Light on in the Hallway right here:

 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/myhalfriddendream