Americana’s greatest material has been born of rich harmonies, starting with a powerful vocal, of course, which is essentially the biggest cornerstone of David Sparrow’s Beggars & Choosers. While there’s something to be said about the poetic depth that Sparrow has as a lyricist, this is an even more melodic effort than I would normally expect from an easygoing singer/songwriter like himself, which is saying something given today’s standards in the genre. Where a lot of his competition is paying more attention to aesthetical intricacy than they are anything centered on melodies, this is a player who wants to go old school in one regard and one regard alone – concept. It turns out well in Beggars & Choosers, from the title cut to more complicated works like the album-opening “Kim.”
URL: https://www.davidsparrowmusic.com/
There’s a gentle swing behind most of these songs, no matter the tempo, and I found that in tracks like “Back in the Old Days” and “Dreams,” it’s particularly integral to the tone of the story Sparrow is telling us. He’s got a lot in common with the old guard in folk-rock from a creative point of view, but his delivery is a lot more relaxed than anything I’ve heard out of previous generations. This is not a singer/songwriter who spends a lot of time thinking about mundane details or what the general trend in his scene is; he’s got something he wants to tell his audience, and getting to the right point of expression is all that really matters when he steps into the booth.
The level of control that David Sparrow exhibits as a singer in Beggars & Choosers should be enough to make scores of his peers feel a little underwhelming on stage, and this is certainly true of his lyrical management in “Sorry Heart,” “On My Side,” “So Long,” and “Changing Your Ways,” the latter two being my favorite excerpts from the tracklist. He’s disciplined even when he has the opportunity to use indulgence to his advantage, which is not a quality that I’m finding a lot of throughout the American underground at the moment. There’s a lot his contemporaries might be able to learn from his style, but all in all, I think he’s just looking to create his own path with songs like “Lost in the Past.”
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Beggars-Choosers-David-Sparrow/dp/B07PBVCDDK
Too many players in modern Americana are overthinking their artistry when they set out to make a record like this one, and from the looks of what David Sparrow is able to do here, he isn’t sweating any of the stress some of the other musicians making his kind of music are in 2022. This is a singer/songwriter who has the right idea about what kind of music he wants to make when he’s in the studio, and his drive is one of the most appealing elements of this entire album. Beggars & Choosers takes us where he wants to go rather than where we feel like it should wind up, which on its own makes it worthy of critical acclaim this spring.
Claire Uebelacker