Although no excuse, it’s the god’s honest truth: the week in September that Zachary Lucky released The Ballad of Losing You, I was losing my head getting ready to move houses, and wasn’t really paying attention to my inbox or release schedules. So it came to pass that the move went off as planned, and Lucky’s second full length was lost to me in a sea of backlogged emails and forgotten until recently.
And yet, I can’t help but feel that some divine intervention was at work, for had I found The Ballad of Losing You earlier than now, I may not have been drawn to it in the same way I am now. These 10 songs demand your attention through their arresting simplicity and earnestness, and it’s doubtful that the distractions of 21st century problems would have afforded me the time and patience to indulge in Lucky’s deep baritoned stories of loss and longing.
He is a prairie boy at heart, and much of what sets Lucky’s writing apart from his country contemporaries is a sense of setting in his stories on top of their emotional arc. Lyrical references aside, there is a pastoral quality to his arrangements that leaves room to breathe between bars (standouts being “Ramblin’ Man’s Lament”, “Woke Up”, and “More Than Enough Road”). Though the record plays as straight-forward confessional, closer “Sun’s Coming Up” adds an unexpected, “maybe it was all a dream” twist at the end as Lucky tells the tale of a man waking from dreaming he was a solider sent off to war with a renewed appreciation of the life that he has.
It’s that last song that suggests nothing is ever really lost if it’s eventually found and loved by someone, so maybe the universe designs and decides just when and how each and every one of us finds what it is we didn’t know we were looking for. I’m certain you’ll agree once you hear The Ballad of Losing You, that you’ll have discovered a new favourite record you didn’t know you were missing today.
The Ballad of Losing You is available from Zachary Lucky’s Bandcamp site. Tonight, he appears at The Owl in Lethbridge, AB, before shows in Medicine Hat, AB at the Inspire Café on tomorrow, The Palomino in Calgary, AB Friday, Kelowna, BC’s The Streaming Café on Saturday, Vancouver, BC’s Anchor Guitar on February 2, Tofino, BC (location TBA) February 3, a house concert February 4 in Duncan, BC, and the Copper Owl February 5 in Victoria, BC. More tour dates are available on his website.