50 serves a number of roles in Michael Chapman’s gargantuan catalog, which encompasses nearly that many albums. As the title suggests, it is a commemorative album, in this case marking half a century as a performing artist. In 1966, the young guitar player finagled his way into a show at a Cornwall jazz club, an unknown talent who turned his audition into a residency. Three years later he recorded his debut, Rainmaker (recently reissued on Light in the Attic), and played the same stages as some of the most inventive and influential folk guitarists of the era—although Chapman bristles at the categorization. He may never have achieved the notoriety of Bert Jansch or John Martyn, and his exploits in the rock world (connecting Mick Ronson and David Bowie, nearly joining Elton John’s band) may overshadow his music, but Chapman’s accomplishments aren’t that of a professional hanger-on. His playing was progressive even for the most progressive era of British folk music, showcasing a complex grammar of picking and strumming based on a vocabulary that commingles blues, jazz, country, raga, and rock.
Chapman has described 50 as his “American” album, and it seems remarkable that he has not recorded on this side of the Atlantic before. Throughout his career, he has been enamored with and inspired by American music and mythology, writing songs like landscape paintings of the West. He’s recorded not one but two albums called Americana, but this is the first time he has actually conceived and recorded a full album in the States, which makes 50 sound like the culmination of a lifetime’s fascination with the former colony. The Yanks he recorded with suggest an attempt to secure his legacy, to trace it from one generation to the next: Steve Gunn produces, plays guitar, and leads a band that includes most of the Paradise of Bachelors roster: James Elkington and Nathan Bowles, along with Jimy SeiTang and Jason Meagher.
There’s some intricate give-and-take between Chapman and the band, as the musicians he has influenced take the opportunity to influence him. Because this is Gunn producing, the songs are focused and succinct, with no little jamming or rambling. More than anyone else in this new generation of folk-derived guitarists, Gunn is less concerned with solo artistry and more fascinated by the chemistry between a band of distinctive musicians, and he brings that dynamic to 50, which isn’t too far removed from his last two albums. The riffs sound coiled and compact, as though propelled by some outside source, and the solos rarely announces themselves as such. Somehow the album sounds American, especially on the high-lonesome “That Time of Night” and the haunted “Falling from Grace,” and that suits Chapman’s brusque cadence and seen-it-all voice perfectly.
Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit. “Memphis in Winter,” which he originally recorded for 1999’s The Twisted Road and revisits here, depicts a hellish urban landscape “where the river comes a-rolling/where the levee tends to break/where to walk the streets at night well it’s not a risk that you would take.” Convoluted syntax aside, it’s a dread-filled update on the crossroads mythology, and Chapman’s guitar shudders with either fear or frost. Even direr is “Sometimes You Just Drive,” which sounds like a roadtrip through Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Chapman’s guitar slices and stabs, unsettling the listener as he ponders a harsh world and wonders if he’s lucky to still be alive: “Sometimes you live, and sometimes you just drive.” Chapman is still doing plenty of both.
