Jeff Hanson Madam Owl by: Fiona Collins Wed:29-Oct-08 Label: Kill Rock Stars Year: 2008 WB rating 73 out of 100

It is rare to hear a male voice of Jeff Hanson’s range away from the opera, where he would probably be a counter-tenor. That means he sounds like a girl. Superstitions and jokes abound regarding injury to gonads resulting in a man’s voice going up an octave.  Interestingly the mythic pitch/testicles connection works backwards also. On hearing Hillary Clinton’s voice, some U.S. political commentators feared for the health of their goolies. Hilarious as all this may be, there are very real links between the pitch of a voice and balls; cultural and biological.

As for the new offering from Jeff Hanson, all of the above should be meaningless, except to mention the huge cojones that it takes to be as true and vulnerable as Jeff Hanson is on Madam Owl. It’s not that Hanson’s voice is not an issue, but it may take a little cultural reprogramming to get past the prejudice and hear the beauty in it, and hear his grace as a songwriter.  All the elements are alive; from the instruments in use to the emotions conveyed. Hanson has collected the loneliest sounds known to humanity and patched them together on one album: accordion, a whole string section, flugelhorn. Don’t forget the saw. Hanson has melded these sounds to make his songs shine. There are a few dull patches here and there, but as a whole, the album is a treasure.

‘Night’ marks out the beginning of the journey with generous orchestration and an almost martial drumbeat, which seems fitting for a song which is a poetic call to arms; the lyrics “Here’s the line/Where I start/Somehow I will begin now” and the violins painting a picture of the night sky. Anti-war song ‘Your Only Son’ draws on the sorrow of a nation and its helplessness in the face of institutionalised lies and callousness. Strings again surface, with an almost prayer-like vocalisation.

The single from the album, ‘If Only I Knew’, is a stand out. The use of banjo as a flourish converts this song from a merely pretty acoustic number into a backwoods ballad that would have pleased Woody Guthrie. Hanson’s lyrics are obscure in this song, but it remains true to the theme of Madam Owl, which is loneliness. The impression of Hanson’s experience and expression of this emotion is not in any way a bleak or depressing one. It sings a lament with an optimistic flavour.

Personal favourite, ‘Nothing Would Matter at All’ can be heard as an ode to the search for meaning in the everyday. It’s quietly lovely and sad. The trumpets are melancholy and the lyrics are heartbreaking. Hanson uses a particularly effective little motif, which gives the song the nostalgic quality of a lullaby or nursery rhyme. There are so many snippets of the lyrics worth mentioning here, but the opener “I wonder what I can do for a living/Something that makes you all proud/But won’t keep me up at night” exemplifies Hanson’s skill as a lyricist.

‘I Don’t Quite Remember’ is pretty, but appropriately, forgettable. It’s one of the lacklustre spots mentioned earlier. It simply lacks the touching openness of the other songs, and feels more like a work in progress.

This review is not the first to instruct readers to put aside any preconceived ideas they may have about Jeff Hanson’s voice, and listen to what it expresses. It is an issue because we do live in a gendered world and those that transgress the boundaries of it are often misunderstood - or worse. And yet because they stand outside the neat Venn diagrams we draw around ourselves, some artists can articulate more simply by asking us to think again about what we see and hear, and the filters we place around our experiences. Jeff Hanson’s voice, in the sense of how he sounds and that of what he says on Madam Owl speaks of the loneliness that we all experience simply because we are delimited by separate skins, and yet it is the hope of connection that binds us together.