Horse Year is available for free download by clicking here
HORSE YEAR
(right-click to download songs)
Something’s Watching (5MB MP3)
When I Leave (5MB MP3)
Horse Year plays like a funeral mass, each track an ethereally-charged dirge that draws us in. “Weak in the Knees” churns to life amid a settling fog, regretful, accompanied by a church organ send-off. “Don’t worry ‘bout me / You can still carry on / ‘Cause I’ll be dead when you’re gone,” Wagner opines, though you might imagine this as the message of a man looking back from the next world. “Nothing to Defend” juxtaposes soaring guitar riffs and whiskey bar piano, the shadow of a gunfighter who’s fallen a step slow, riding headlong into the rain in search of the next sunset.
These images lend an undeniable weight and immediacy to the album, but it’s the spectacularly bone-chilling, otherworldly reverberation of the pedal steel that stays with me every time I hear it. It’s there in the ending wash on the otherwise-amiable cowboy ballad “This World Can Be So Cruel”, and it’s revisited on the album’s final number, “One Key”. Here it resonates beside a wind chime lullaby as we drift along the river Styx, nestled beneath the stars and blissfully at peace with the horrors and the beauty of the world.
— Justin Kownacki Splendid E-Zine
Alll songs written, performed and recorded by Andy Wagner
Mark Benson played drums on Weak In The Knees, Nothing To Defend and Two Minutes
Matt Lindblom played electric guitar on One Key
Recorded at RadioJoe’s in Louisville, Kentucky
All songs Copyright 2003 Andy Wagner