Dan Whitehouse - Reflections On The Glass Age (acoustic) (2023) Hi-Res

“When you change the way you look at things/Watch the things you look at start to change/Through the flame of this gentle blaze/everything is re-arranged”.

So it is that the opening lines to Dan Whitehouse‘s Campfire serve to sum up this album. Reflections On The Glass Age is an acoustic reworking of his hugely acclaimed 2022 album reflecting on how, in terms of communication, we have become a screen society and how, while many decry that development, screens do have a function.

The song, about how he kept in touch with home while stuck in Japan by broadcasting songs at 5 am local time, has been stripped back to feature just his voice and minimal ruminative guitar pulses and strums. It’s exquisite.

Gustaf Ljunggren provides the piano accompaniment for the title track (and three others, all of which he also recorded and mixed live), perfectly complementing Dan’s vocals, softly rising on the “are you watching me?” refrain, and is also behind the keys for The Tide, although the piano here, conjuring perhaps New York dusk, is more of a counterpoint as Dan sings about the fluid nature of virtual life (“The tide within reminds me I’m water”) versus our physical selves before the last verse turns to climate change issues (“The flower got broken in two discoloured, wilted in the heat …Now it cries out for water/Its petals ripped and torn/Oh what have you done?).

Much slower and more than a minute shorter than the original but still sporting faint Bowie echoes, Thin Blue Line returns to guitar with Billy Maree on backing vocals. The lyrics are set against “this bleak yet pristine land at the edge of the earth”, where Antarctica, tales of bodies buried in the ice and a thin blue line people are said to see there before they die, becomes a metaphor for being in Japan to see his son and, unable to work without a permit, losing his identity as a musician “merely two oak beams, drifting towards the sea”.

Intimately sung to enhance the melancholia that veins the mood and words (as elsewhere he is drawing on the stream-of-consciousness nature of Japanese haiku poetry, with small phrases pregnant with meaning), Remind Me is achingly sad as he sings how “the sorrow, like a fountain/ Builds within me, no one’s counting/As it breaks me into pieces”, and yet also about self-care and self-respect (“Remind me to turn, and let you in/Remind me to love my sleep/Remind me to bury my demons/Remind me to feel your heat”).

Ljunggren returns for the final two tracks, the first, Rainbows Never End, a valedictory love song about his unconditional love for his son who now lives in Japan, the piano striking measured but strident notes that capture the swell of emotion.

Finally, the product of a Chris Difford songwriters retreat, New Love (originally titled Home, as heard in the refrain) is the most dramatically reworked; formerly an upbeat calypso-coloured track, it’s now an almost cinematic end-of-day anthemic hymnal (though those True Colours melody influences remain on the chorus) as it quietly fades away on dying notes. A completely different listening experience, Reflections On The Glass Age is one to be embraced in calm and solitude and a glowing illustration of Dan Whitehouse’s versatility as a musician to bend songs to different purposes. In what is probably a first, it chalks up an impressive triumph in having two versions of the same album, twelve months apart, both claiming a spot in my year’s best.