KEVIN COPELAND

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If you happen to recognize Kevin Copeland’s name, it is most likely because you were digging through the credits on other artist’s records. Hannah Frances, Lamplight, Allegra Krieger, and Lily Seabird are just a few of the artists he’s produced with. Maybe you’ve seen him on the road, playing pedal steel, guitar, or bass. Or maybe you recognize him as a member of Paul Spring’s band at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook on a Friday night.

Regardless, Copeland has made good on a bet that he’d write a record filled with Only Love Songs. Self-produced and recorded at his Vermont studio, this is his (self proclaimed) “first happy record”.

The bet was a defiant response to a friend’s assertion that love songs were the lowest form of songwriting – they had no protest in them, they made no difference, and were ultimately a waste of energy. It seems a lot of folks might tend to agree – while the canon of song is replete with breakup albums, first-sight eroticism, or pining for the unrequited, songs about enduring partnership are remarkably few. It’s almost as if people in this kind of love are expected to shut up about it – it’s too bright, too unrelatable, too naïve in-this-economy. And in his first attempts to make good on his wager, Copeland admittedly found himself encountering similar problems – celebrating love to the exclusion of pain produced songs that ultimately felt insubstantial.

But love has now found Kevin Copeland, and it’s no state of exemption. The New York-based producer (Hannah Frances, Allegra Krieger, Lily Seabird) and songwriter did end up writing Only Love Songs, but the resultant album begins with Copeland addressing an all-too-familiar set of opposing forces: his body, the government, and the gravitational force of malaise are all trying in concert to keep him down again. Love’s arrival on the scene doesn’t eradicate these burdens, but rather galvanizes Copeland to act against them: “I won’t keep me down – ‘cause I can’t keep _you_ down,” he sings. It’s an aspiration that changes everything, and Only Love Songs is a catalog of all the shadows and corners this light renders anew.

While the album is Copeland’s first outing as a solo artist, Only Love Songs inherits the musical hallmarks and chemistry of Copeland’s prior songwriting vehicle The Big Net – collaborators Logan Miley (bass) and Andrew Emge (drums) are present on the record, as is their established palette of Duster-meets-The-Band power-trio minimalism. During an early phase of recording, Copeland’s bandmates agreed to his pitch to put Only Love Songs out under his given name, granting him the freedom to both embody the album’s songs with a newly personal approach and to lean into musical directions that were at the edges of The Big Net’s musical palette all along. “That’s All Over Now” is an outright country barn-stormer, “Money” is as close to genuine blues as an indie rock band has dared to get this decade, and much of the record expands upon Copeland’s distinctive love for the infinitely interchangeable possibilities of the Celtic one, four, and five chords – the gorgeous, resplendent folk of both “Whole” and “Stay” could’ve been the envy of Fairport Convention had they been released sixty years earlier.

And then there’s “Hotel Bar,” a tune improvised almost entirely on the fly and guided by a winding, Crazy Horse-indebted riff, complete with a 60-cycle Telecaster hum. In an era rife with songwriters whose aesthetics are perhaps too quickly likened to Neil Young, it’s refreshing to hear Copeland actually opt to follow him into characteristically unrevised, first-thought best-thought lyricism. Copeland’s nouns are often similarly shorn of adjectives – in “Hotel Bar,” you won’t find a description of the room, mention of a destination, or even what the narrator’s drinking, but you will find some of the album’s most affecting lines on merging your accounts with another. “I like to think that I’m suffering / But I know that I’m doing just fine,” Copeland sings, before repeating the same phrase with “I” swapped out for “you,” exhibiting a kind of levity that can only result from witnessing and being witnessed.

“Once you have another set of eyes on you, it puts your pain in perspective,” Copeland says. “It’s still there – but it just lets you treat it a little more lightly, like something that can be moved or changed.”

This potential for change is perhaps love’s most important effect on Only Love Songs – the idea that tomorrow is possible, that suffering is just one factor in an economy of emotion. It’s one thing to hear songs like these as a songwriter’s new lap around a well-worn track of tradition, but it’s another to hear someone come by these forms for the same reason they were initially created: to express an experience that is both infinitely personal and universally shared. When Copeland admires his partner in “Trains and Angels” with a line like “the way joy and fear / they lie curled at your feet,” how could you not believe him? When he compares the future’s gleam in “Goodnight” to either “the bomb or the sun coming up,” what else but love could embolden him to hold those possibilities in equal measure? Songs about love are not new, nor will they ever be – but Only Love Songs reminds us why there will infinitely be more.

— Caleb Cordes

Photo Credit: Allegrea Krieger