Alex Bevan
Fly Away
“The longer you do something, 
the more you realize how strong - and powerful - your roots are.
I have always been drawn to the rivers, the local streets,
n' the people who've been part of this journey.
It just seemed, with this record, like it was time to come home.”
     When Alex Bevan set out to begin work on Fly Away, his 19th record in a career that has been marked by a couple local anthems, the seminal Springboard and the picturesque Grand River Lullabye, he'd been collecting the songs for almost two years. As always drawing from the personal, when the often laughing songwriter laid out what was there, he saw a journey and a cohesion that reminded him of songs healing power, and also the power of songs to capture moments like fireflies in a mayonnaise jar with a few holes poked in the top.
     “I know everything about every line,” he admits with a twinkle in his eyes. “These all come from specific people, real places, actual events - and like those early records, I think I've managed to show them with all the warmth and possibility there was. Even some of the really painful ones, things that I wasn't sure how we were going to get through them, have been transformed through the songs…"
     “And if there's one thing that I think music can do it's turn something hard into something that heals.”
     Opening with the lilting “Mississippi Medicine,” a song about a boy and his father and adventure along the river that gave Mark Twain so much inspiration, Bevan offers the homeyness that has always made his records a hearth and refuge in the world of Northern Ohio's hustle to get by. Recorded with just his voice and his time-honored Taylor Guitar at Suma Recording Studios on the banks of the Grand River, the singer whose ad hoc, ad libed “Ho! For The Weekend” was the Friday at 5 whistleblow for rock giant WMMS in the mid-to-late 70s sought to strip the performances back to their barest design.
     “As you go you learn more tricks… You find technological breakthroughs that offer you options… and you keep falling down that rabbit hole,” he concedes. “Next thing you know, you're so far from the thing that really defines you, and it winds up that you're not always sure how to get back home."
     “I'm lucky: at the core, I am a folkie. That's about as lean and clean as you make it… From the time John Bassette took me under his wing, showed me how to create my own record company (ha!), I've been able to let the songs do the heavy lifting. I think almost 40 years later, it occurred to me that perhaps I should return to letting the songs do the work again.”
     Having played dates with Odetta, toured with Steve Goodman and Jethro Burns and anchoring the early Coventry Street Fairs - where his spontaneous “Sun Chants” would unite both ends of the teaming Cleveland Heights hippie street in the rising “whooooooaaaaa. SUN,” Bevan understood the granular notion of songs. All he had to do was let go and drift into the songs.
     “I have a very old friend… who probably knows as much about my music, my songs, my voice as anyone - and I asked her to come into the studio with me,” Bevan begins. “Holly has been a critic, a midwifer of dreams, a songwriter in her own right - and she's pretty tough on what she thinks a performance ought to be. 'Less, less…,' she'd say. 'We want to hear your heart, not the rest of it.”
     “Being back at Suma with Paul (Hamann), who was such a part of the early Fiddlers Wynde Records, really took me back to the origin of so much of what I do. When you're standing in the middle of all that love, those places where you can only be your most bare self, you surprise yourself.”
     Working from a template of the blues-inflected “Cages,” a song that considers the consequences of being tamed when stretched across the truth of not always realizing, the breathtakingly elegiac “The One Who's Gone” (for his friend and early mentor Sean Moore, who passed the winter before this record was made) and the coaxingly encouraging “Feel Better,” which encourages embracing the darkness without shame as a way to access the light, the nine songs of Fly Away measure the phases and cycles of one man's heart/soul.
     “As we grow up, life's subtle edges become more pronounced… or maybe we just see them better,” Bevan explains. “You learn to judge less, love more, work to heal, to make the world a kinder place… but also that strength means not always giving up, but finding ways to bend in the storm. It is in literally having to practice these truths in my life that so many of the songs came into being.”
     Certainly “Love Lifts,” with its intricate picking and ebullient faith in the highest of human emotions in the eye of the trial, and the picture perfect “Living Room” demonstrate Bevan's gift of detail to reflect the  essential truths inherent in turbulence, focusing on what's right to steer by. These are songs about redeeming the human condition, recognizing the beauty in the frailty and the strength that can be found in simple things.
     Simple things have been Bevan's stock and trade for four decades. It is how people come together, connect, help, heal and find compassion in each other that has always inspired him. Even conflict and dissolution have their place, as fans of Grand River Lullabye remember. But it's not what breaks our hearts that should be clung to, it is what makes people heal.
     “Much had happened,” Bevan admits, “but also a lot of healing, strengthening came out of it. It is the hard things that make us more - and it is where we find the power to move through it that inspires me, that inspired these songs. We all have trials; I'd like to think these songs can remind people - the way they reminded me going through them - that they are stronger, more decent, more resilient than they know…”
     Songs have always mattered to the man who found the sardonic first 16 lines of his “Have Another Laugh on Cleveland Blues” opening Newsweek's coverage of Cleveland's bankruptcy in 1978 - and it is the power of songs to mock, skewer, invite and balm that has kept the crown prince of Put-In-Bay, Kelly's Island and local ports anchored in his pursuit of the muse.
     Nothing embodies that truth more than the starkly percussive, deeply haunting “Song.” With the profession, “Put a sun sign on my brow, put a moon sign on my palm/ I will walk through the valley of the shadow, I shall fear no harm… If you see me coming, baby, you should know my name/ I'm not the cause and I'm not the reason, or the message cloaked in blame… I am strong like water, I am brave like wind/ I am the truth, I am the spirit that makes the world begin…,” Bevan stakes the claim for music's solid higher ground. It is a bold frame, but it comes from a moment of divine inspiration.
     “Some songs you work at… you know what's there, and you keep going back til you've stripped away everything that's getting in the songs way,” he explains. “And some songs, just arrive, pretty much intact. 'Song' is one of those… like I was a divine channel for the muse's truth. Something the muse needed said, and decided I was the one. 
     “I just tried to hold up my end of the bargain, to record something that really reflected what is being said. Because after all these years, all these miles, it is the songs that carry these truths that transcend everything: time, place, hurt. Hard to believe, but the longer I do this, the more I believe it.”
     Alex Bevan's career has been a journey. Passing through autumn melodies, viewing gunfighter's smiles and rodeo riders, taking silver wings, reaching for simple things well done - and always creating songs from what he encountered... and it's that journey that thematically binds Fly Away. Beyond “Mississippi Medicine” and “The One Who's Gone,” the promise of escape to savor what is sweet and let the distance sort out that which plagues you marks the carefree travel tale of “The Road To Montreal” and the sparkling finger-flickered 'Fly Away,” an invitation to jettison the blues.
     “It's funny when I play these songs out, in clubs or at concerts in places like Kent Stages or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's 15th Anniversary Celebration, it's surprising how well these songs connect. You can see the people really looking, really hearing what's inside these songs - and it reminds me I'm not the only person who needs to remember the way to rise above.
     “A long time ago, John Bassette told me 'Just love the people…,' and every troubadour that I've looked up to ever since pretty much says the same thing. I think love is finding what brings you closer, finding the common ground - not just in the Skinny little boy from Cleveland, Ohio who's come to 'chase your women and drink your beer' - but the places where it's not easy.
     “If getting to making this record taught me one thing, it's taught me how precious that is.”
     As Antione de St-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince “what is essential can not be seen with the eye, but only with the heart.” Forty years later, for Alex Bevan, the vision is clear and strong and the essence of all the things that sparkle and remind people how good it is to be alive.
     “I have someone tell me these songs gave them a return to wonder,” Bevan says happily. “If music does that for someone… puts them in a place where they marvel at the world around them… well, that's what drew me to this all those years ago, so it's a good thing to know that, at least musically, you can go home again!”
www.alexbevan.com