The Bonny

About

At the end of March 2020, while the UK was adjusting to social distancing measures, Gerry Cinnamon resolved that his second album would arrive in the middle of April as planned. Even as a tour that was set to seal the Glaswegian’s five-year ascent from jam-night host to stadium headliner was being rescheduled, he wrote on his social media pages, “Not smart to release during a lockdown when the shops are closed and everyone’s isolating but no chance I’m letting folk down.” It was an apt promise for a record that’s rarely more than a few bars away from offering words of hope to troubled souls. “If you’re in a real shit situation it can be near impossible to see a positive outcome,” the folk-rock singer-songwriter told Apple Music a few weeks before the album’s release. “I don’t want to contribute to the negative shit in my writing; there’s more than enough of that going around already. If I write songs about the bad stuff, I think it’s only polite to remind the listener of the real reality: that it doesn’t matter where you’re at, it’s where you’re going that matters. Put the graft in and better times are inevitable.” Cinnamon’s willingness to put his own experiences into the lyrics stops these sentiments from sounding empty. He’s regularly panning through darker days to pull out nuggets of optimism and fortitude. On “Canter,” he has an amusingly frank word with himself: “You know it could be a canter/If you were a wee bit less of a wanker.” Built around a typically indelible chorus, “Sun Queen” finds him sorting through his past—“Sing my songs, never thought I’d make it this far/Weren’t so long ago that I used to sell nine-bars”—to reveal what matters to him now: friends and family. Even on “Roll the Credits,” a bruised portrait of love dissolving, he sounds like a man willing the emotional gut-punches to land so he can get on with the business of picking himself up again. Smartly released or not, <i>The Bonny</i> could offer a tonic in uncertain times.

via Apple Music