Loving’s origin story sounds like a myth, or a joke—Jesse Henderson and David Parry walk into the woods separately (as tree planters in Western Canada) and a little while later, a folk-pop brotherhood emerges from the forest. Inspired by voice memos, poems, and James Hollis’ Jungian treatise The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, the songs on Any Light are breezy, mystical meditations on spirit and belonging—love songs that look inward, upward, and skyward in their pursuit of existential answers.
One part George Harrison and one part Kings of Convenience, Any Light is all looping acoustic guitar and plinking keys, an endless journey guided by warm melodies. “Medicine” is a less jocular take on Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin.’” “On My Way to Loving You” amplifies face-pressed-to-the-window wistfulness with Hammond organ. “When I first met you,/Time was measured/By the moon on your body,” Henderson sings on “Blue,” slide guitar wailing plaintively in the background. “No Mast” is as sweet as a candy heart, an ode to the illusion of permanence in love built on ’70s radio chord progressions and tambourine shaking like a fluttering pulse.
Often, the “you” in the album’s lyrics gestures at an unseen other, some entity that would offer completion or absolution, whether that’s a god or a lover. In “On My Way to You,” Henderson describes “following in your footsteps…/Trying just to be/Like a melody/You sing,” before stepping outside of love to watch it flow “like a river follows the landscape.” “Medicine,” loosely based on a friend’s experience with psychedelics, turns almost completely allegorical, its protagonist announcing a few seconds into the song: “I don’t want something already made,/I want to be the image not on display,/I want to be set free.” The song is just charming and self-aware enough to skirt the “hey man” variety of mushroom-induced revelation, but elsewhere, the musings are more grounded, easier to take seriously. The titular opening track is a tone-setting highlight that guides us like Virgil through this peripatetic folk journey. “I’ve been waiting so long,” Henderson sings in wonderment. “How I had it all wrong./Never have I seen you,/With open eyes,/With any light.” There’s that platitude about missing the forest for the trees, but Loving toggle between a bird’s-eye remove and an intimate closeness, from high above a river to a shaft of moonlight falling on a sleeping form.
Sonically, this balance sometimes lacks. There are few extremes; the record is one meandering slog through a wintry landscape, pleasant and Quaaluudy to the point of occasional somnambulance. Songs like “Gift” barely register, especially relative to the bright punch of “Any Light” or “Uncanny Valley.” “Ask Directions” begs for a build, a moment of heightened stakes, but languishes instead in contemplative lethargy.
In the Jungian interpretation, myths are part of our collective unconsciousness, both the thoughts we have and the way we think them. Rife with dream imagery, Any Light interrogates the gulf between the promise of love and its reality, the stories we tell ourselves about divinity and the way it humbles us the closer we get. Men journey into the woods for plenty of reasons, from self-discovery to solitude. When they’re lucky, they come out with a musical other, if not a magical one.
