On their third album Forevermore, LA-based Grand Canyon manages to mine everything from early Springsteen and E Street band albums to Tom Petty for a remarkably satisfying listen that somehow manages to be both familiar and strikingly original at times. From the opening track, “Heart of Gold,” you can almost hear the crowd cheering on the arena-ready roots rocker, complete with jangly acoustic guitars and harmonica. But it’s Casey Shea’s raspy vocals and the backing chorus that really sell the song.
The band manages to carry that vibe across the entire record. In an era of downloaded singles and shuffled playlists, Grand Canyon is a band that focuses on albums, not singles. “As kids, albums meant something to us,” Shea said recently. “They still mean something to me; I’d rather listen to an album than a playlist. So, I mean, it may be against better judgment, but it was important to us to release these songs together.”
And because this is a band that thinks in terms of full albums, the sequencing of Forevermore matters. The build started with “Heart of Gold” and continues to climb throughout the collection with several breaks to catch your breath throughout, like on the mid-tempo heartache track “Whose Gonna Love You” and “You Are Not Alone”. Lyrically, the band took inspiration from a surprising source for this album. Forced off the road for a couple of years, Shea committed himself to reading the Bible (something most religious leaders likely have never done before) from page one to the very end. While not a Christian rock record (breath a sigh of relief Stryper), he brings some of the biblical characters and situations into the modern world on this record.
Grand Canyon is not afraid to wear its influences proudly and neither do they shy away from strong hooks and singalong choruses. Recorded locally during the pandemic – where LA had one of the strictest protocols at the time – songwriters Joe Guese and Shea converted Shea’s garage into a makeshift studio and taught themselves to record, engineer, produce, and mix the entire album on their own.
