Being immortalized in song by Led Zeppelin-- and collaborating with everyone from Kate Bush to Paul McCartney to Pink Floyd-- ought to do wonders for one’s career. That hasn’t always been the case for Roy Harper. In some ways he’s been the invisible glue that’s held together generations of singer-songwriters, a one-man secret history of progressive folk-rock underscoring the continuum that stretches from Bert Jansch to Joanna Newsom. In other ways, he’s been overshadowed by those who love him most. In 2009, Harper lamented the fact that, by his accounting, he’d never been paid by Roger Waters for singing lead vocals on Pink Floyd’s 1975 hit “Have a Cigar”-- a song, ironically, that condemns the greed of the music industry. Harper had just pledged retirement from that industry, one that praised him far more than rewarded him. At the time, it had been nine years since he’d released an album, 2000’s The Green Man. If Harper were to be believed, it would be his last.
It’s now been thirteen years since The Green Man-- and that gap has been stopped by Man and Myth. Still, it feels like a stopgap. Harper explores no new territory, sonically or thematically, on the disc’s seven songs; if anything, it’s a stately retreat into the 72-year-old’s well-trod sound. As always, his voice is alternately dream-shrouded and strident, and his fingerpicking remains fluid and supple. On “The Enemy” and “January Man", his acoustic serves as a shadowy, impressionistic backdrop as he ruminates on the past, both fictionally and confessionally. “The Enemy” dwells with melancholy sentiment on the faded specter of post-World Word II romanticism; “January Man” goes gingerly for its own jugular with unguarded pathos: “Time fell away/ Licking my wounds/ A lifetime astray,” Harper keens, allowing his nostalgic narrative to crumble into fractured syntax.
Those cracks grow too wide on “Time Is Temporary". The song’s overbearing wordplay can’t overcome a pedestrian, at times corny talking blues. “A vision of purity / In an old Pre-Raphaelite dream” Harper pines, but his anachronistic overlay of 19th century aesthetics and 20th century Americana is more of a muddle than mystery. “The Stranger” fares far better. Celtic-accented and breathtakingly dynamic, it’s a dark yet lilting ballad that erupts in bursts of revelation and suspense. Harper’s obsession with myth is given a suitably epic treatment on “Heaven Is Here", a 15-minute odyssey that recalls his 1971 masterpiece Stormcock in its richness and scope. What begins as a simple recounting of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts morphs slowly, across a mist of crystalline strumming and elliptical verse, into a deep gaze into Harper’s own mirror. “O how do I/ Retrace my youth/ From present lie/ To former truth,” he sings. As cheeky and clever as Harper can be, it doesn’t seem like meta-commentary on his own body of work; rather, it’s a study in the gray area between myth and mythopoeia that imagines a prog-folk Joseph Campbell.
The steady cadence of Man and Myth is most strikingly broken up by “Cloud Cuckooland". Harper trots out one of the most overworked metaphors in Western culture, but he aims it at a fresh target: fame. Unfortunately, it’s not aimed well. Despite a bombastic assist from Pete Townshend, who unleashes an inspired burst of riffage, “Cloud Cuckooland” paints the post-millennium as a little more than a place where “The punters gather at primetime/ On the flat screens of their dreams/ To vote for dumb celebrity.” Harper dresses up the rest of his rant in pretty language-- including a shout-out to one of his closest contemporaries, Neil Young: “The great shampooed are stranded/ With the cowgirls in the sand”-- but it’s still a rant. Existing in the fissures between stardom and obscurity, between myth and man, Harper has never been either. Man and Myth won’t change that.
