Nathan Kalish - Songs for Nobody (2020)

Nathan Kalish is the kind of songwriter that other songwriters love. He’s a road warrior and his travels fill the pipeline of the songwriting cycle. When you combine that with a band that’s turn-on-a-dime tight and knows how to groove across a variety of styles, the results are more than just okay. The songs on Kalish’s newest album are as sonically and lyrically diverse as the day-to-day life of folks who put in long miles every day just to spend every night in a different town doing the same old one-night stand.

‘Songs For Nobody’ covers a lot of ground but it’s held together by a focus on characters and scenes that know hard work, high hopes, and fragile dreams. Sometimes the songs take a perspective that is in the middle of it and trying to look up. Other tunes remind us that there are others on the outside and looking in.

From the Bakersfield-sound of the title track, where Kalish lets us know that he’s “just passin’ by” to the bluegrass-infused ‘No Hope‘ where he reminds us that there “ain’t no hope for the poor in this country any more”, the album does a lot of things well. It does all the things that a good album should do and it does them better than most.