Folk Music Review: Dan Reeder — Weighing Consequences and Accepting Defeat… “Just Feels Sorta Natural”

February 28, 2020 / Eileen Tilson

“The piano and guitar composition “Love & Hate” (2020) laments life’s interlocking pairing of pleasure and pain. The song bounces from the initial cliché of the title to an allusion to Amazing Grace and ends on “bitch and complain.” Finishing on a minor chord, the tragic is reduced to the mundane. We are told “man, you should have seen her face / when she thought I had misplaced / those insurance papers.” We don’t need any great adventure in life to make us see how fragile it is to sit on the wire. “Young at Heart” (2019) spells out this revelation, the singer announcing that he has come to “hate disruption” and “fear change.” A lack of faith, cynicism about democracy, complications with sex, and a general hardening-of-heart — all come at the price of accepting our fate as something less than romantic or heroic… as something that “just feels sorta natural.”