Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
No matter where you go in life, there is always a Wildwood.
Such a place on the map goes by many names, some archaic and stubborn, some a little brighter, but no less conservative in its outlook, and the person with emotional dreams, with a different outlook on life, will always find a way to leave it…dreams are always on Borrowed Time, and if you don’t escape the Wildwood when the call comes, how can you ever hope to return with ideas on how to change it for the better.
Life, love, dreams, once the clock ticks on the appointed hour and the sacred minute, the alarm doesn’t just go off, it screams into the darkness, and that one bus out of town, it leaves without you.
For Dana Fuch, one of the most enlightening of performers to hit the road in the last 20 years, her time is almost unique, not a single second of it feels borrowed, indeed it could be argued that she is the one who keeps the clock ticking for others, she is on permanent watch to inspire others to leave the Wildwood of every county and pursue time as the gift it is.
The bus out of Wildwood hurtled past Bliss Avenue and stoked the fires on every road ever since, and now in her latest recording, the superb Borrowed Time, she salutes the town that made her, that pushed her and which set her on her way to explore with a deeper sense of time and brings a howling beauty to the guitar and the southern Florida Rock that she bathed in as she paid her dues and collected IOUs in return.
Those IOUs from the heart of her childhood and through her career are such that her sound not only inspires, it captures the heart, she sets it in time to her own beating muscle and she unlocks the cage of the listener’s making, and through tracks such as Blue Mist Road, Call My Name, Curtain Close, Not Another Second On You, Lonely Lie, and the album’s title track of Borrowed Time, Dana Fuch refuses to budge in her spirit and outlook; that borrowed time is not hers, she has found a way to set her own clock, her own rules, in her own glorious and sensual way.
There is always a Wildwood, and it is a place to come back to, to think fondly of, but time and guitars wait for no one, and for those with a rebellious streak, those who see beyond the framework of the tick and the tock, time is in their control; make time for Borrowed Time, for once again Dana Fuch celebrates the occasion with beauty and honour.
Dana Fuch releases Borrowed Time on April 29th on Ruf Records.
Ian D. Hall