With his gentle strumming and mournful voice, you can just picture William Fitzsimmons playing by lamplight at Downtown Music’s SOHO studio in New York. Fitzsimmons’s latest EP, William Fitzsimmons: Live Sessions from Downtown Studios, features seven baleful ballads of lost love and heartfelt melancholy and, therefore, is the perfect medicine for a lovesick heart.
The talented youngest son of two blind, yet, musically inclined parents, Fitzsimmons spent the earlier years of his life growing up in steel-country Pennsylvania. This Appalachian lifestyle is certainly reflected in Fitzsimmons’s melancholy, folk-acoustic EP.
Each track sings anew of the desire to reclaim, rekindle and reignite a relationship that has turned to ash. “I Don’t Feel It Anymore,” an acoustic version of the song from his album The Sparrow and the Crow, tells his listeners to “hold on because this will hurt more/ than anything has before.” This ode to a lost romance sets the tone for the remaining six songs. “Goodmorning” sings of a new beginning with someone else as he promises “you will find love.” “Maybe Be Alright” mourns the end of a relationship that never even got off the ground, exclaiming “I am sorry for everything I did/ but I’m still that stupid kid.”
The only hopeful song on the EP is “After Afterall,” which describes the desire to still love even after relational pain, crooning “for better or worse/ sickness and health/ till death do us part/ afterall.”
As a whole, most of the songs on the EP are spent justifying relationships gone south, but the last song begs for forgiveness. “Please Forgive Me” lists all the ways he hurt his lover and then releases her at the end of the song, exclaiming “and so your heart is free/ and so your heart is free.”
However, to mix things up, Fitzsimmons teams up with musical accomplice Rosi Golan on “If You Would Come Back Home,” which is also from The Sparrow and the Crow, and again on “You Still Hurt Me.” The two have worked together before, and Fitzsimmons is featured on Golan’s album The Drifter and the Gypsy. Together, Golan’s deep, whispery voice combined with Fitzsimmons gentle tenor make for a breathtaking musical experience.
William Fitzsimmons: Live Sessions from Downtown Studios is sure to please fans even if it does not win over new listeners in the process. The addition of Rosi Golan and the acoustic versions of several of his songs are musical candy to those who already love him. The EP is a great addition to any music collection and great for rainy day listening with your morning cup of coffee.
All in all, the recording has a very intimate-sounding quality, picking up every twang and folksy strum of the guitar. Despite the almost-gloomy nature of the EP, its musical depth and poeticism of real-life experiences make it worth shelling out $7.
3 stars out of 5
