This is GREAT news!  A new Pierce Turner album, LOVE CAN’T ALWAYS BE ARTICULATE,

and Turner’s first since SONGS FOR A VERRY SMALL ORCHESTRA in 2012. Fifteen tracks, twelve originals, and three covers that Turner makes his own, and one of which, for lack of a better term, is transplendent. More later.

LOVE CAN’T ALWAYS BE ARTICULATE is Turner’s tenth or eleventh proper solo album, and this one looks and sounds like a Best Of 2016 contender. The album title comes from a line in a decades-old Turner song, YOU CAN NEVER KNOW, from his 1987 album, THE SKY AND THE GROUND, and what makes LOVE — the album — interesting at first listen is that it was recorded at a church in the Gramercy Park section of NYC. Turner himself calls his new album “the other side of life, the side of love, peace and understanding, the right blend between this influence and that, the way I wanted it to taste.” And Turner’s tastes are clearly influenced by his family home in Ireland, where he lives part of the year (in County Wexford, the location of the beautiful homeland scenes in the Academy Award-nominated film, BROOKLYN), and in Manhattan, where he’s lived part of each year since the late 1970s. And of the original songs on LOVE, some reflect Wexford more than NYC (HE GETS GONE), some NYC more than Wexford (HEAL, YOU ARE LEAVING), and some both locations … and just about everywhere else. One original that stands out (while pointing to Turner’s church roots) is TANTUM ERGO, which Turner sings in Latin, and is a modern take on a thirteenth century hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas. In Pierce’s words, the hymn had “a beautiful melody, but no chords, and the chords that I chose, after a lot of fiddling, are part of what makes TANTUM ERGO contemporary.” When you record a contemporary album in a Manhattan church (built in 1889) in the twenty-first century, this sort of thing is likely to happen.

Turner has largely avoided covers on previous albums, but on LOVE, you’ve got a gorgeous bare bones version of DO I STILL FIGURE IN YOUR LIFE (a song associated with Joe Cocker), Randy Newman’s I THINK IT’S GOING TO RAIN TODAY (a perfect vehicle for Turner), and a magical cover of Marc Bolan’s LIFE’S A GAS, which Turner says was influenced in part by watching a YouTube clip of the song performed by Bolan and the great Cilla Black. Pierce’s LIFE’S A GAS is a not-to-be-missed, and a … uhhmm … transplendent version of a great song, and one that will be difficult to get out of your mind afterwards, which is something one can easily say for the whole of LOVE CAN’T ALWAYS BE ARTICULATE.

Mark Rosenblatt