THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Matt Andersen’s The Hammer & The Rose is a veritable garden of heart. On his latest record, the Canadian singer-songwriter opts for the kind of thoughtful, tender sentiments and arrangements one might associate with flowers, trading in the hard steel edges of his heavy blues riffs for delicate compositions and a warm sweetness.
The title track provides an elegant metaphor for the differences and push-and-pull relationship between the head and the heart: The head wants to blaze a trail, prioritize practicality, and motor through things, while the heart wants to slow down, feel things, feel good. On The Hammer & The Rose, it’s the heart — the rose, the honey, the soul — that (mostly) wins out. But this is, of course, a Matt Andersen record. A surplus of heart is to be expected.
After seeing one of Andersen’s shows with The Big Bottle of Joy band featured on his 2023 album, producer and percussionist Joshua Van Tassel took him aside to express how much he loved the quieter moments of the set. Inspired by those times when the wildness settled down and he could hear, even clearer, the timbre and texture of Andersen’s voice, Van Tassel suggested cutting a record that maintained that low-key spirit. Andersen got to writing with that in mind, and it was the same chill vibe the team fostered for the sessions that would eventually go down in Wolfville, N.S., where Christine Bougie (lap steel), Aaron Comeau (keys), Kyle Cunjak (acoustic bass) and Afie Jurvanen (acoustic guitar) gathered with Andersen to lay the tracks down live off the floor, with Van Tassel behind both the boards and drums.
The gently swinging title track opens the album and provides its thesis sentiment as Andersen laments the perpetual give-and-take between his stubborn head and soft heart. Roomier and more subdued arrangements allow his voice to take centre stage as he channels Don’t Give Up On Me-era Solomon Burke for songs like the simmering ride-or-die ode You’re Here to Stay, the sorrowful tough-luck number Countin’ Quarters, and the comforting Hold On To Me, a warm promise to be there for a friend. Expressions of gratitude arise elsewhere on the record, too. It comes through on romantic songs, in the domestic bliss of the hushed Stay Home With You” and the soon-to-be first dance staple Tonight Belongs To You, a brief, moonlit history of Andersen’s relationship with his girlfriend. His take on the classic Magnolia does justice to J.J. Cale’s simple tribute to a transformative love.
While the record, sonically, is mostly rooted in roses, Andersen offers up a couple hammers, too — on the seething country number Wayaheadaya, he calls out negative and small-minded thinkers; and The Cobbler (Good For My Sole) cuts the album neatly down the middle with its funkiest two minutes, a mostly instrumental interlude inspired by Andersen’s prompt to Van Tassel to send him a groove that the latter’s late father would love.
But at the curtain call, it’s a return to gratitude — for the man who shaped Andersen, in the stirring closing track written for his aging dad. “No matter where we go now or what changes come,” he sings, “you will always be my father, and I’ll always be your son.” It’s sentiments like these that shape the blossoming core of the record. On The Hammer & The Rose, Andersen tends to his garden — to his heart — and reminds us to do the same.”
