Some quiet music needs to be played really, really loud. Nick Cave’s masterpiece The Boatman’s Call springs most obviously to mind, and I might include Leonard Cohen in that, as well as some Lamchop and Bonnie Prince Billy (fuck off with your quotation marks). You could have the stereo at full volume when listening to this, and still strain to hear some of the more hushed moments.

Timothy Dick almost brings time to a halt, pauses the breath in your lungs and silences all around you with nothing but the sheer careful quietness of his music. It’s the sort of stuff you could silence traffic with at Piccadilly Circus. When Howe Gelb drops his tin can blues approach, he slows down to this kind of careful, dusty storytelling, rich with character and emotionally laden with great droplets of imagery. You watch them grow and form until they are impossibly full and it seems like you hold your breath forever as they finally break away and drip downwards.

See, even I’m at it now. I’ll be kidding myself I’m a proper writer if I keep this up, but you know what I mean, hopefully. This kind of timeless songwriting and delivery seems to have lived in America since before time began, and simply seeped into the hearts of some of the settlers the second they set foot on the soil. You know the kind of music with so little ornamentation that you listen for every last flick of finger on guitar string, or strained syllable of verse?

Timothy Dick is not rock ‘n’ roll, and he is unlikely to become famous. I can’t even see you getting into this unless you really, really take your time and genuinely do nothing else while you listen to it apart from gaze wistfully out the window and absorb the music. But this man could make boiling eggs seem like an epic tale of heartbreak in the tragic story of some doomed life we’ll never know.

Timothy Dick – Lost Star

Big thanks to Shane from The Torture Garden for alerting me to this.

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