Album Review: Willy Mason - Carry On

With artists churning out albums at startling speeds, it's refreshing to find one who is willing to take their time. Carry On comes five years after Mason's last album If The Ocean Gets Rough. The progression within Carry On is as measured as the time it took Mason to create it. From the dawdling, rustic vocals on opener What Is This, the album gradually builds to establish intricate stories that are developed and interwoven with a delicate grace.

With a penchant for lyrics, Mason has developed extraordinary talent in expressing thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears in the simplest and most valuable of ways. In the title track, Mason describes the nature of life through the existence of a moth (“Now he's circling to the ground/His wings are burnt, he's falling down/I just watch and wonder how to carry on”) and he just as easily explores ill-fated situations in Pickup Truck through the eyes of a young, vulnerable girl (“She's got a pickup truck/Sleeps in the back when she gets stuck”). Closing track If It's The End demonstrates that Mason's work isn't all gloom and doom, with a poignant yet optimistic look at death (“If it's the end, it's not the only end/Let it begin, let it unfold again”) and concludes the album in a needed, more hopeful note.

With his deep, country twang punctuating every lyric with clarity and sentiment, Mason creates 40 minutes of reflective and moving music. The fact that he is deliberate and unhurried in both the development of the stories within his songs and his musicianship in its own accord definitely helps to boost the emotional impact of this record.