In some ways, there is little more that can be done with the singer-songwriter sound. After all, its sonic dimensions and musical wherewithal were fixed and finalized many years ago. And, even if you were charging over the musical boundaries in search of new pastures for it to play in, you would probably find yourself outside the remit of the genre anyway. The music that you make there might be good, but would it still be the singer-songwriter sound in the traditional sense? Probably not.
What is great about Pictures of Nothing, the latest album from Sean Hopkins is that he tests the boundaries of the genre just enough to keep things fresh but only so much that things still feel familiar. And, although I said there is nowhere new to take the sound, rather than push it outwards into possibility, he digs down into the potential of what is already there. No, there might not be much new that you can do with the style except write better songs, find the perfect meeting point between solo player and band sound, design richer sonic textures, work with poise and purpose, shimmer, shine, and seduce, sonically speaking. And all this he does here.
“All About Love” sits delicately between two masters of this art, David Gray and Damien Rice, and that is not a bad place to position yourself: equidistant between commercial accessibility and ethereal soundscaping, between pop and art.
“Beneath The Stars” shimmers with lush acoustic resonance and cosmic harmonies, “Bridges Tides Have Washed Away” is understated and philosophical, and “Silence Was A Friend of Mine” sits between folk and pop in the same way that Simon and Garfunkel used to so brilliantly.
I’m probably wrong that there is nothing new to take the singer-songwriter style, but even if I’m not, Sean Hopkins shows us that there is always one thing that you can do, and this goes for any genre, I suspect—just do it better than everyone else. Again, a box he ticks brilliantly here.
