Jonny Nash’s Once Was Ours Forever is a sterling example of the Made of the Same Stuff album—as in, it doesn’t sound exactly like his last album, but it’s made of the same stuff. You know the type. They’re not victory laps, diminishing returns, or B-grade leftovers so much as manifestations of how far an idea can go. They lack the element of surprise usually present in the prior album, instead showing off the artist’s ability to inhabit a particular sound. And while these follow-ups are easy to underrate on the first few listens, they might end up becoming your favorites.
Nash is a Netherlands-based artist who’s been enamored of woozy Robin Guthrie-style guitars since 2015’s Exit Strategies. He really hit on a distinctive sound, however, with 2023’s Point of Entry, a lovely ambient guitar album where every note seemed to melt off the neck of the guitar in thick, cheese-like gobs. It sounded like a suspension of moments in movies or cartoons where a character ingests a strange drug and their hands start going fish-eye in front of them. Once Was Ours Forever isn’t much different, except in all the usual ways Made of the Same Stuff albums are: a bit more insular, more stripped-down, more confident and, inevitably, shorter.
The vibe is pastoral, bucolic, folky, a world of limestone crags jutting from emerald pastures. Nash has a little country studio outside of Amsterdam, and Once Was Ours Forever puts the listener in a vacation mindset. Music about the artist’s experience of paradise sometimes reeks of certainty and the little death that comes with it, but there’s a too-muchness to this music that keeps it exciting. Listen to the uncanny, lustrous filter he puts on his voice on “Blue Dragonfly” and “Bright Belief,” and you get the sense that the phrase “laying it on too thick” is a positive in Nash’s process.
This time around, the record focuses on Nash’s newly assured guitar playing. While on previous records he mostly let the tones talk, here he engages with the fretboard itself, spinning similar fingerpicked webs to those on Will Ackerman’s empire-launching In Search of the Turtle’s Navel while thick textural smears light up the depths of the mix. The featured guests are mostly here to be absorbed, including Japanese singer Satomimagae, who contributes dewy murmurs to “Rain Song,” and saxophonist Joseph Shabason, who was one-half of the horn section on Destroyer’s louche-nouveau masterpiece Kaputt and seems most content when he’s being used to give a swath of color rather than as a soloist.
I’ve played Point of Entry and Once Was Ours Forever together in a low ambient background hum to discern whether I could tell when one album had melted into the next. I didn’t figure it out until halfway through Once Was Ours’ second track, “Dusk Can Dance.” But the two albums leave a different impression when they’re over: the first of the excitement of stumbling on a new sound, the second of witnessing intuitive mastery. And the best thing about Made of the Same Stuff albums is artists usually follow them with something completely different. Jonny Nash could do anything next.
