Songs Album II is LA musician Aaron MF Olson’s Country Thyme Records debut, his second ‘songs for singing’ album in just over a decade of releasing music. Aaron’s a sweet fellow. He can be salty on occasion, but it’s put to good use here. His songs mix satiric, confessional and experimental lyric modes and his music’s cut from a fine cloth of head-in- formed, classically sweet and soft pop/rock modes. Most of all, Songs Album II is music for listening.
To listen to and to play music; that's been his highest aim, for most of his life. His high school band was a post-rock group that morphed into a surf music outfit; he’s been similarly guided by such polarities ‘n congruities in the time since. He’s released four albums of “Baywatch Krautrock” with LA Takedown, and played and recorded in many other projects, including but not limited to his experimental Music Tracing Ensemble, exotica collective Other Delights, Bedouine, Coffin Prick, Papa M, Tommy Peltier, Vetiver and “L.A.’s Most grateful Dead cover band,” Richard Pictures. Aaron’s solo credits include 2020’s switched-on essay, Ranchera '22 {Synthesizer Interpretations of the Songs of José Alfredo Jiménez} and the 2022 New Age release, For Dorothy. He does film/television composition too; most recently, the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for Matt Hewitt’s indie horror film, Hoagie. Life’s not cheap, and so far as hard work goes, making music is fun.
If all this implies a wide palette of input/output, Songs Album II has it in reserve, framed scrupulously in a sequence of nice, light folk/rock ditties, their spacey-yet-precise arrangements colorfully blowing up the songs’ personal values: by definition, perfect listening! It’s Aaron, on most acoustic and electric guitars and basses, keyboards, harmonica, synth & vocals, Robin MacMillian on drums, Tara Milch, flute; Michael Sachs, clarinets; Luke Csehak, bassoon & trumpet; additional guitars & vocals from Blue Broderick, Bart Davenport and Wayne Faler; keyboards & vocals from Andrew Dorsett and vocals by Matt Popieluch, making Songs Album II a collection of widescreen, hi-def songs and sounds.
Aaron’s voice is light-toned, gentle and tunefully raspy, falling somewhere between Jack Nitzsche, Van Dyke Parks, Robert Wyatt, and personal inspirations John Simon, Stephen Pastel, Jim O’Rourke and Kermit’s nephew, Robin. And Emmett Otter! Not a bad bunch to be sharing the water with. He came late to singing; 2021’s Songs Album was literally provoked into being. He’d was down with COVID, a lifeless, cold week, sweating it out… and immediately afterwards, he finished several already-conceived songs, wrote the rest, got it all done in weeks — a post-fever fervor! Without trying to, Aaron came around to Songs Album II in the EXACT same way, after another bout of demon COVID. He’s a singer/songwriter who’s been known to dream musical passages, with a couple on this record in delightful proof — welcoming the hand of the mystic upon him.
The “no particular theme” implied by the title is only part so. It’s no concept album, unless the concept is “album, of songs,” but there ARE themes to be found here, feels and emotions crystalized around this lifetime of listening. With moments of sound laced into song, functioning both as toe-tapping sweet melodies and near-Joycean full-function index of personal reference, Aaron MF Olson’s Songs Album II is music meant for listening to in the spirit of listening, and higher calling. And singing along!
1. More Than a Life's Work
2. Nobody Can Tell
3. There Comes a Time
4. The Small Planets
5. Who Do You Think You Are I Am?
6. Gilded Lawns of Summer
7. Jennifer (Here With Me)
8. We Welcome Our Travelers From the Wormworld
9. The Punisher
10. The Endless List of Anything
