JOHN WORT HANNAM
AND THE SOUND MERCHANTS
Pocket Full of Holes
Independent
· The Fort MacLeod songwriter John Wort Hannam releases songs he’s been playing live around the province on this 11-song charmer.
Perhaps it’s fitting that U.K.-born, Alberta-tempered songwriter John Wort Hannam has released his first album during a drought. If the images of once-green fields turned to powder that have been flashing across the nation during the past months were to have a soundtrack, this album would be it. Not that there’s anything dry or malnourished about Hannam’s sound. Although it is simple – highlighting mandolins, violins and bagpipes – it is also rich and sweet, flowing from the source with the pureness of a mountain stream.
But it’s Hannam’s verbally woven images that befit that soundtrack – boarded up windows and collapsing water towers; farmers who stay on the land to take all the dust storms, floods and hail that nature can hurl at them. The Prairie tales are juxtaposed with a smattering of sea ballads that unlock the dust from the land and plunge it into salty tales of another breed of farmer, one who harvests the ocean. Hannam’s talent is in tracing the face of hardship in words that are more real than romantic and in tunes that are the fulcrum between finished and raw.
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