Andy Shauf writes songs full of drinking and dancing, deep conversation and inside jokes, close friends and old flames—and he’s having a miserable time. Since his 2009 debut, the soft-spoken singer-songwriter has grown increasingly adept at telling stories from the vantage of the next morning’s hangover: plagued by regret, lingering on moments of unease stitched through an otherwise pleasant evening. Like Phoebe Bridgers, he incorporates bits of dialogue into his lyrics that illustrate not just how his characters speak but also how they really feel about each other. Like Jens Lekman, he accompanies himself with hushed, breezy soft-rock that can betray the intensity of his thoughts. Some of his best choruses are wordless refrains, the sound of singing along without knowing what to say.
Shauf’s new concept album The Neon Skyline takes place over the span of one night, as did his last solo record, 2016’s The Party. The story goes like this: Our narrator heads to a bar where he hears that his ex is back in town. From there, he spirals through the course of their relationship from young love to jealous arguments to dreams of starting over. He eventually runs into her and they go their separate ways. But by this point, late in the album, you’ve learned that reconciliation was never the point. In the climactic “Thirteen Hours,” Shauf drifts through a flashback that doesn’t focus on the fight that brought out their true nature, or the injury that landed one of them in the hospital. Instead, the key lyric is about a simple facial expression that suggested how things could never be the same again.
These are subtle scenes to hinge a narrative on, especially one as simple as this. Deeply earnest but wary of dipping into melodrama, Shauf gravitates toward the quietly stirring realizations you’d find in a Raymond Carver story. There is no irony, little closure, and often no moral at the end. He’s now in his early 30s, more than a decade removed from an early adulthood spent playing Christian pop-punk, and he has updated his songwriting to reflect precisely the kinds of social situations that keep polite, seemingly well-adjusted adults awake at night. The mood—wistfulness giving way to self-deprecation, deep insight cut with awful puns—is both familiar and endearing.
The most affecting songs arrive during the album’s mid-section, when a polite question about a friend’s kid in “Living Room” turns into a hallucinogenic vision quest about death and reincarnation and living out our parents’ mistakes. The ambling folk music—which Shauf plays entirely by himself on piano, guitar, woodwinds, and beyond—dims and intensifies to suggest a change in setting. When he sings about an intimate story transporting him into someone else’s home, you feel like you’re there with him.
For all Shauf’s expertise as a writer and arranger, the quality of his music that stands out is his gentle, fluttering vocal affectation. Upon first listen, I was certain he was Scottish. He’s actually from Regina, Saskatchewan and just so happens to pronounce the name “Charlie” in a way that sounds closer to “shoreline.” He cracks a good joke about this in the jaunty “Try Again,” where his narrator approximates a British accent to a response of bewilderment: “What was that supposed to be?” Like any good storyteller, he knows when to punch things up—you could play a drinking game with the number of times he mentions characters laughing at each other. But he also sounds a good deal lighter than he did on The Party, as the story of The Neon Skyline calls for a voice that can drift from bar to bar, mood to mood. How sad can you be when the bartender knows what you want without asking and the jukebox has your favorite song?
The Neon Skyline doesn’t require deep investment in its narrative to enjoy. Still, the closer you listen, the more rewarding it becomes. Shauf is growing increasingly masterful at casting a spotlight on tiny moments that tend to get overlooked in stories about relationships. In “Try Again,” a loaded misunderstanding provides one of the album’s best scenes: “I miss this,” she says, touching his coat; “I miss you too,” he responds; “I was talking about the coat,” she clarifies. The record ends with a similarly subdued revelation, as the narrator allows himself a brief fantasy about how things could have played out differently between them. The thought is momentarily thrilling, and the music is equally smokey and romantic, until he cuts himself off: “Oh, I’m already bored.” He’s learning that there’s a whole world out there—new people to meet, other stories to tell, more nights to regret.
Buy: Rough Trade
