James Younger

Out on the city limits, with its faded frequencies of A.M rotary dial radio stations, they wear double denim, black boots and leave their hair growing long. And like some small town boy hustling through the noise of downtown traffic for the first time, they still carry photographs of their girls back home, and stare through the tinted windows of passing sedans. Then, at the end of a working week spent two or three drinks steadily deep, they grab their pocket knives, their paychecks and bring in the weekend with the other union crews, dancing and scrapping to their father’s favourite songs.

Back when these songs were still adolescents, playing hooky with Alicia and Liv, or smoking cigarettes behind the bike sheds, James Younger kicked back in his armchair watching re-runs of Northern Exposure on his VHS machine. And seeing them fly the nest, these road trip songs for the future, he waved them off with a copasetic smile, content that they would sway the shoulders of the common man, moving him through the ritual of his Saturday nights and his Sunday mornings.

James Younger, (who cut his teeth as the co-frontman of junkie country outfit Sun Wizard and tours with prog pop group the Zolas) is the free thinker of pop music, because he doesn’t consider “pop” to be a dirty word. He constructs choruses that could topple empires with that creaky old instrument: the guitar. Simple as it sounds, when you’re just one man writing songs with just that one Telecaster, those songs need to be the tops. You can spit and hit one hundred songwriters, but you’ll find yourself cotton-mouthed before you can hit another James Younger. He considers guitar music important, and with his latest releases it looks like he might be the one spearheading that movement.