Since releasing his first album in 2005, Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter Mike Mangione has been a quiet mainstay in that nebulous frontier where country, folk, and rock meet. With a voice that calls to mind a less husky Ray LaMontagne, a mean hand at rhythm acoustic guitar, and an older brother named Tom who plays electric lead guitar, Mangione has established a durable, approachable sound that is deceptively simple. His sixth album, Blood and Water, finds him digging deeper into the stylistic markers that have made his music what it is.
At least some of the credit for this entrenchment should go to producer and multi-instrumentalist, Larry Campbell. Campbell played with Bob Dylan during those critical years of the legendary songwriter’s renaissance in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and later was Levon Helm’s collaborator and musical director. Recorded at Justin Guip’s Milan Hill Studios in New York, Campbell brings a beautiful clarity to Mangione’s songs, matches guitars with brother Tom, and plays pedal steel and violin. But foundationally, it’s Mangione’s songs that cling to their roots while he explores themes of sacrifice and renewal.
“Anastasia” opens the album with a violin melody that sounds like it came straight from Appalachia and lyrics that make use of the old folk song device of a repeated second line. Early in the song, Mangione delivers the album’s emblematic lines, “I’m dripping blood and water/ Oh, don’t you go/ To save my home and daughters/ Oh don’t you go.” For Mangione, blood and water represent sacrifice and rebirth respectively and are the twin images around which the album is built. As he puts it, “All things of significance and value in our lives require a certain level of sacrifice.” While the album’s musical layers sink in with multiple listens, it only takes one pass to hear that, for Mangione, sacrifice and rebirth define love.
Love on Blood and Water is not a feeling or a simplistic pandering to a sensual form of nostalgia. Love, in Mangione’s conception, sounds a lot like work. In the loping anthem “Love Ain’t No Easy Thing,” he sings “I don’t want no simplified, sterilized, half realized [sic] version of love/ Because love, real love ain’t no easy thing to do.” On “Giving Up On You,” a marching beat opens the tune and, when the band comes in, subsides to an implication as Mangione sings of love’s resilience: “And in the days when I’m hurt and weak/ Pierced by nothing but those words you speak/ If left alone I would surely disappear, if not for love.” And in the album’s triumphant closer, “Spirit Awake,” he sings of love as the ultimate healer: “Life is painful/ But stay strong/ And for you I write this song/ It’s in love where we humans carry on.”
Mangione is careful to come at the overarching theme from a variety of angles. The result is a tough and honest album that feels like a journey through Mangione’s broad range of musical appeals. When describing an early recording on his website of “Against the Grain,” Mangione comments that the song was initially inspired by the strumming pattern that Bob Dylan used for “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” during the Rolling Thunder Review. Mangione takes this hypnotic pattern and builds a call to action with the urgent appeal of a classic protest song. On the other end of the spectrum, the punchy, up-tempo number, “You Didn’t Come Here Alone,” makes some unfortunate person the object of a diatribe that finds Mangione getting downright salty in the name of truth and love.
One of the joys of this album is that no matter where Mangione’s songs take him, his more than able band follows. Campbell brought in Guip (Hot Tuna) on drums, Byron Issacs (The Lumineers) on bass, and Will Bryant on piano, organ, and accordion. Almost nothing is beyond their musical grasp, yet everything feels complimentary to the anchor of the songs, Mangione’s acoustic guitar. Campbell’s production gives his guitar a crisp, woody sound at the center of the mix. Isaacs holds the bottom end like a boss, and Guip, with an easy attack and a dry, rustling snare is the perfect drummer for this session. Campbell and Tom Mangione bring layers of interest to the songs on electric guitars that absolutely make the album, adding musical asides and solos without stepping on each other’s toes.
Blood on Water is a strong and encouraging musical statement from Mangione and a testament to his skill and insight as a songwriter.
Christopher Raley
