A Breath Of Fresh Air
Rediscovering things is fun. All the magic of a genre you'd forgotten or lost interest in can be rekindled if someone makes a song in the right way. Johnny Flynn has done just that with "Leftovers", his latest single. It is delightful folk-pop with a compulsively forward-moving drum line that brings every "road story" you've ever heard or seen to mind. The song is travelling somewhere that is both sad and funny in the same way that life is sad and funny, and it feels really good to listen to. It makes you feel better about loss.
Think Bright Eyes' "Another Travelling Song" or a less self-despairing Kristofferson. I want to say Dylan, but I'm not sure if Flynn is so applicable to mass-culture. Dylan captured the zeitgeist of an era of American (and international) history by re-imagining the music of his idol, Woody Guthrie. Flynn is in the same mode, but he's from Sussex; in a very English way his music feels like movement, like a road-trip, but his subject matter is very much place-oriented. His band is called The Sussex Wit, and he name drops the Underground. Home seems to mean something very different to Flynn than Dylan or Conor Oberst.
"Leftovers" is also a song about food. "Give me a dime for bacon rind, or slip me some of that old sardine". It is about the most basic of human needs; however, metaphorically it's also about being the second-choice of someone you love, coming second place in the race for someone's heart. The self-destructive consumptive practices of American road songs (think Hank Williams) are tossed off in favour of survival, of an acceptance of less. Flynn is declaring that he's alright with not having the bulk of someone's love, that for him, companionship (no matter the brevity) and enough food to keep on living, is enough.
In a culture of compulsive possession where most music expresses a terrifying and cannibalistic desire to have everything, Flynn's music is a breath of fresh (and free!) air. He is perhaps singing one of the most necessary messages I've heard in a long long time, and you can dance to it, too, which is always nice.