Joy: Sailing Days
By
Evan Sawdey 4 April 2007PopMatters Interviews Editor
Sail Away, Sail Away
Sailing Days is an EP made specifically for listening while on a back porch with nothing to do. Lazy acoustic guitars move and dance with violins, and you begin to realize why naming the EP Sailing Days is amazingly apt. Each song works by itself, but even for an EP, the tracks to begin to meld together in a sort of easy-listening mush, as if each song is battling it out for the title of Who Can Be More Precious. Of the seven songs (two untitled bonus tracks are tacked on at the end), it’s the aching pair of songs “Hammers and Hail” and the bluntly-titled “Sex” that managed to stand out just a bit more, the former with a simple acoustic yearning, the latter coming off more grand and majestic with its triumphant strums and hardly-there drumming. It’s not going to top any Album of the Year charts, but for a pleasant, enjoyable piece of acoustic pop, nothing can beat it.
Evan Sawdey began contributing to PopMatters in late 2005 after contributing for years to his college newspaper
The Knox Student. Evan became the Associate Interviews Editor for PopMatters in the summer of 2008, and then the full Interviews Editor a year after that. Since joining, Evan's work has been written for and been quoted/featured in a wide array of publications including SLUG Magazine, The Metro (U.K.), Soundvenue Magazine (Denmark), the Daily Dot, and multiple national newspapers. Evan has been a guest on WNYC's Soundcheck (an NPR affiliate), was the Executive Producer for the
Good With Words: A Tribute to Benjamin Durdle album (available for free at
GoodWithWordsAlbum.com), and wrote the liner notes for the 2011 re-release of
Andre Cymone's hit 1985 album A.C. (Big Break Records) and the 2012 re-releases of
Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder's standalone 1985 pop effort (Virgin/Gold Legion),
the JoBoxers' 1983 debut album Like Gangbusters,
'Til Tuesday's 1985 debut Voices Carry, and
Plastic Bertrand's 1978 album AN 1 (all Hot Shot Records). He is a current member of The Recording Academy and resides in Chicago, Illinois. You can follow him
@SawdEye should you be so inclined.
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