With its mashup of wah-wah guitar, cocktail piano, and the lightest of funk grooves, his voice sometimes mimicking the sound of the guitars, “I’ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)” manners to be intimate and disturbing at the same time. “All Along the Way” starts all sensitive and fingerpicky before building into the sonic equivalent of a stroll in a spooky forest. In its low-key way, it’s as eccentric and trippy as almost anything he’s done. Which points to the main hook of Entering Heaven Alive: thankfully for him (and us), White can’t be normal even when he wants to be. Given how songs like these could have sounded in other, more conventional hands, the cringe factor is exceedingly low. They’re pared down but, with their tactful use of various unplugged instruments (sometimes all played by White himself), they manage to be low key yet dramatic and wintry. And some of those tracks-”If I Die Tomorrow” and “A Tree on Fire From Within”-are among the most arresting and least self-conscious songs he’s made in years. Entering Heaven Alive is flush with surprisingly nimble and fluid melodies that remind you of what a song craftsman he can be when he’s not overcooking his music. Per the standard rulebook of pop, sentiments like that usually call for fussy, super-delicate accompaniment, and White doesn’t disagree. In “Help Me Along,” he confesses he’ll “travel to the ends of the earth” for his loved one, and he revels in a shared sense of blissed-out naughtiness in “Queen of the Bees”: “Let’s take a stroll to the end of the street/Put your hand in my pocket so the neighbors can see.”
Whether they were inspired by her or not, other songs find White mulling over his need for love and devotion. The song talks about Jack jumping over a candlestick. The album was recorded last year, before his recent onstage marriage to Black Belles guitarist and singer Olivia Jean. An English nursery rhyme by Mother Goose, Jack Be Nimble has been around since the mid-nineteenth century where the rhyme was first collected in a manuscript and then recorded by James Orchard Halliwell in his English Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales collection.
Other songs like “Love Is Selfish,” have a White-on-the-couch feel: “I’m on a train, but I cannot rest upon it/I’m on a train but it won’t stay on the rails.” In “Please God, Don’t Tell Anyone” he practically begs the Lord not to let his father know of “the ways I’ve been sinning/Ever since the beginning/He won’t understand.” On “If I Die Tomorrow,” which muses on his own early death, he asks for help with taking care of his mother (“with the many things she needs from time to time and day to day”). OL8088647W Page_number_confidence 92.54 Pages 230 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.14 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20210628192315 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 656 Scandate 20210625044054 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9780571145737 Tts_version 4.In keeping with its to-the-bone feel, the songs have the confessional quality of any rando, long-haired singer-songwriter record of rock past. For someone who’s cultivated an air of mystique and aloofness, White seems willing to grapple with ghosts of the past and engage in what sound like recorded therapy sessions.
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