“I know I’m impatient, you think I got somethin’ to hide / But all I want is for you to be on my side,” pleads a heartfelt David Sparrow in his song “On My Side,” much of his vocal tone reflecting the eminent warmth of its parent album as a whole. In Beggars & Choosers, Sparrow’s provocative 2019 LP, we’re introduced to a pensive singer/songwriter who utilizes reticence to paint a picture of empathy that a lot of his peers just can’t form, no matter how surreal the aesthetics they’re employing. Beggars & Choosers is indeed a post-hipster folk/rock record, but not the one you think you’ve heard before.
There’s a heady western influence over the likes of “Rescue Me,” the title track, and the Mullholland Recording Session take “Mean Jean,” and I think it balances out the straightforwardness of Sparrow’s poetry brilliantly. Rather than trying to implement hokey cosmetics as a means of replacing seriousness with raw wit, he’s coupling the retro with the postmodern, which takes a lot more charisma at the microphone than most of his rivals can muster up inside of a recording studio. His is a rare talent, and we’re getting a close-up peek at it in this release.
Although the instrumentation behind “Kim,” “Dreams,” “Back in the Old Fays,” and the bold “Sorry Heart” is anything but virtuosic, I think its cut and dry stylization is actually one of the more interesting points of emphasis to behold in Beggars & Choosers. So much of what the alternative folk community has become in the past ten years revolves around conceptualism, but here we have a singer/songwriter who uses conservative songcraft – not minimalism – as a template over anything else. It’s eclectic in presentation, but overall this is an LP that stands firm to the traditional model where it matters the most.
The arrangements we find in “Lost in the Past,” “So Long,” and the aforementioned “On My Side” highlight the focus that David Sparrow has when he’s got the spotlight to himself, and I would even go so far as to say that they’re some of the best material to showcase his duality not only as a lyricist but as a harmonizer. He connects with a string part, a piano melody, and just about anything else he comes in contact with here like it’s divinely planned, and yet his execution isn’t the least bit robotic in nature.
I can’t wait to hear what a follow-up LP from this singer/songwriter is going to sound like, and while there’s a lot of interest in the neo-Americana movement coming out of the underground at the moment, I wouldn’t necessarily lump in Beggars & Choosers with what the majority of output from that scene has consisted of. David Sparrow is, more or less, a troubadour with a taste for angular verses and the occasional indulgence in anti-cathartic poeticisms, and what he’s breaking down in this LP is far more sophisticated than what his hipster predecessors were ever known for releasing in their era.
Rachel Townsend