Of course Life Is People, Bill Fay’s 2012 LP, felt like a spectacle: It was his first proper record in more than 40 years. At the start of the '70s, the Englishman released two imaginative, mystifying folk-rock albums that were critically lauded but commercially stillborn. After low sales prompted his label dismissal, Fay decided not to press the issue. He retired to private life, started a family and recorded new tunes only for his own fulfillment.
Still, his reputation steadily spread among singer-songwriter literati, and those early albums became collector’s items. Reissues followed, along with a plea from the young American producer Joshua Henry: Make another record with me. On the resulting 12 songs, choirs emboldened Fay’s humble mantras about self-fulfillment, miniature orchestras afforded his modest folk songs symphonic splendor, and Jeff Tweedy traded verses and shared choruses with one of his idols. Fay seemed like a singer who’d returned to reclaim the due he’d missed for an entire generation. Life Is People was his triumph over time.
But the new and muted Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high. He expresses frustration and consternation with the world, its wars and persecutions, and prays that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday repair it all. Fay sighs as much as he sings here. The once-soaring strings turn doleful, and harmonies that felt like life-affirming proclamations just three years ago now seem like cries for survival. The album’s only celebrity guest, Spiritualized leader J. Spaceman, is relegated to near-anonymous background harmonies. Fay’s transition suggests a radically time-collapsed echo of Bob Dylan’s career between the early '80s and the late '90s, as he moved from religious exaltation to end-times anxiety.
"What on earth is happening? What have we done?" Fay mutters over a somber piano stomp during "Underneath the Sun". The song is an observation in two parts: Fay first finds wonder in the nature around him, where trees climb skyward and squirrels scavenge for their refuse. When his gaze turns to people, though, he sees only the threat of bullets and bombs and the suspicion that society will ruin everything around it. That same resentment creeps into "War Machine", a smoldering excoriation of humanity’s animal instinct to kill by funding an army it doesn’t question. And the beautiful ballad "The Freedom to Read" tells the tale of the court-ordered immolation of a 16th-century Protestant labeled a heretic for translating the Bible into English. It’s as if, three years after promising universal redemption on "The Healing Day" or exploring the magic of miracles on "Cosmic Concerto", Fay has accepted that his songs have yet to make the world any less bitter or more benevolent.
But Who Is the Sender? runs deeper than blind kvetching: Fay’s Christianity, and his cautious optimism in its power, uplifts him. The gently rising "Order of the Day" treats the Book of Revelation like a balm. The banjo-backed "Bring It on Lord" is a prayer for peace and healing. Perhaps all this sounds off-putting and naïve, but on Who Is the Sender?, Fay emerges as the rare religious songwriter who talks about his God without imploring the audience to make it their God, too. His beliefs seem too personal for him to proselytize on their behalf, too wrapped up in his survival for him to justify them. On "Something Else Ahead", he even confesses that his doubts about religion have never really vanished but that maintaining his faith is his tool of perseverance. "Let’s just hope there’s something else ahead," he sings sweetly above circling strings, "that a life on Earth don’t just end."
That sentiment resonates with the resurrection of Fay’s interrupted career. Who Is the Sender? effectively doubles his recorded output and moves him from the category of a curiosity who returned after a four-decade absence to make a third great album to someone perhaps capable of doing so in perpetuity. But Fay seems to have few regrets about the way things went, a question he addresses during the opener "The Geese Are Flying Westward". He follows the avian migration and wonders if he should have ventured far from home, too, if he would have been happier had he pursued his musical aspirations. But he concludes he’s grateful for the seasons and years he’s witnessed at home, the place that’s made the perspective of his late-life albums so very poignant.
