Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A person behind the vision is just as important as those who feel the experience in the first place and for every musician who makes it into the studio with the faith of their conviction behind them, there has to be a producer, an engineer or someone to perhaps add the most invaluable piece to any recording, the ability to listen and perhaps steer the artist in the right direction.
Like a play without a director, a poet without a muse or a chef without a restaurant owner, the boundary that exists between the man in the studio and the artist is one that divides as much as it unites. When that line is crossed, when the producer becomes the artist though the ability to listen becomes even more blurred and it takes someone of very generous nature, of outstanding feeling and emotionally attachment to make it work; in Jon Lawton, that sense of purpose is heightened and in his 2013 album White Lights that height seems unfathomably beautiful.
Whether it is in the gorgeous arrangements laid out, the sympathetic detail in which the likes of Vicky Mutch on cello, Christopher Demetriou on violins, Selman Pak on the intriguing kanun or the vocals supplied by Mr. Lawton himself, Joe Hazlett or the ever cool Nicola Hardman or just in the endearing ability in which Jon Lawton combines the talents of musician and producer in one fabulous album is pretty much up for discussion, however all three aspects of the end result cannot be dismissed out of hand easily.
White Lights may have come out in 2013 but it is an album of sincere depth and in tracks such as CCCR, the intoxicating Nihavend, Soil and the album closer of Shame, White Lights lives up to the responsibility it sets itself out to deliver, that it aims to showcase as a piece of marvellous musical engineering. It asks nothing more of the listener than to sit back, relax into the still quiet waters and enjoy the erupting spring that warms up the soul from the outside in, to wallow in the benefit of a man who knows how to listen.
Ian D. Hall