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A Person & A Heart
Jon Troast
Independent release, 2008
http://www.jontroast.com
REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 07/17/2008
For a year that started off ho-hum, 2008 sure has made up for lost ground in the past couple of months, especially on the indie front. First Mike Zito, then Last Charge Of The Light Horse and now previous Indie Of The Year runner-up Jon Troast returns with another album of superb singer-songwriter material.
It’s hard to start talking about Troast’s new disc A Person & A Heart without referencing the blog he’s been keeping on his MySpace page while performing a series of house concerts around the country. His warm, low-key, yet subtly observant entries help you understand his musical personality and why house concerts would suit him well. His songs are friendly and warm and revealingly wise and he comes across like the charming cousin you’d gladly invite to stay over in your guest room or on your couch, just as long he brings his guitar.
Musically, Troast sounds like the long-lost love child of Lyle Lovett and Jack Johnson, a shaggy acoustic troubadour with a keen wit, a soulful voice and an endearing earnestness about him. A Person & A Heart features a full band for the most part -- complete with twin saxophones -- but the songs never lose their intimacy and immediacy, and Troast’s throaty, low-key delivery never loses its inviting vulnerability.
The opening title track is as pop as anything he’s ever done, with bells and piano and a supple electric guitar line and a big chorus supplementing his effortless rhymes. The song itself, though, feels like an M.C. Escher painting, circular in its portrayal of the difficulty of expressing three-dimensional emotions and relationships in the form of two-dimensional art. The fact that he chooses drawing rather than songwriting as the art he writes about is what makes the whole metaphor work:
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