Album Review: Shane Pendergast, Second Wind

Shane Pendergast’s new album, Second Wind, makes a convincing argument that Prince Edward Island might be one of the better places to ride out this pandemic. Considering the last year, it would make sense for his music to be isolated, exhausted, or melancholy. Not that some of those feelings are absent from his music, but Pendergast’s songs manage a much wider range of emotions as well. 

Where melancholy shows up, like in the delicately lonely filigree of Josh Langile’s picked guitar that introduces the first single “Autumn Rain”, it seems temporary; when the weather shifts, the self-loathing of the song’s protagonist also is put on hold. There are also great joyous moments like in “The Waltz of the Figurehead Maiden”, which is almost a reel and a good reminder that folk music is dance music, or the excellent fiddle on the courtly track “Yours To Borrow” which includes the charming chorus, “Is this deeper than the dance? / Will you feel this way tomorrow? /I guess I will have to take a chance / our love is yours to borrow.” The old fashioned quality of the line, updated and deepened by Pendergast’s tenor and Andrew Murray’s guitar, is central to the best song on the album, “Man With Stories” -- a song about his father and grandfather’s relationship to lumberjacking in Maine and song catchers collecting stories about the same. 

The song is haunting--about losing memories, forgetting, and not being able to replace them with your own. In that song Pendergast claims that he is not a “man with stories”, I would respectfully argue that in a scant two albums and eighteen months, Pendergast has become the maritime storyteller that I am most excited to hear more from.

Second Wind was released March 5, 2021
Listen to it here