Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Collaboration is a strange and magnificent beast.

To involve someone else in your imagination takes courage, you don’t know how they will react to even the slightest change in mood as ideas flow thickly, or as slowly as precision dictates. To collaborate in art is take on a greater degree of trust that is akin in many ways to that of a marriage. Each side has their own interpretation of what will ensure success or a brief beautiful liaison, each moment is a learning curve that is steep and possibly undermining to the overall creation; and this is never truer than in the debut offering rather than in the long-established contribution.

Fortune By Design is a charismatic album by Brooks Williams and Dan Walsh. Two amazing talents of the British Folk and Americana Roots who have connected with a fierceness that proposes a future wrapped in gold.

The very nature of the album is one steeped in the fortune of will that the album title decrees, full of humour and poignancy, each man laying the foundations of harmony with care, and ultimately revelling in the songs that create the riches of each musician’s thoughts and expressions.

Across tracks, covers and interpretations such as Just Listen, It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie, Imagine That, Paper Jam, and the fantastic opener of Church Street Blues, Brooks Williams and Dan Walsh’s response to the fine music is to climb higher, to keep the standard ever reaching for a place where passion and friendship is the ultimate glory to be attained.

To collaborate is to open your heart to interpretation, and be it on a large scale involving many, or in just the comfort of a duo in tune with their own personal enlightenment, and for Brooks Williams & Dan Walsh the revelry is an enjoyment that carries deep into the listener’s soul.   

Fortune by Design, a prosperity fulfilled by enterprise and intention; an album that proves collaboration is in the minds open to another’s sense of beauty.

Ian D. Hall