Last year seemed to brim with transformational potential for Christopher Paul Stelling. For the better part of a decade, he had been a feverish and itinerant troubadour, spilling guts and blood and sweat in soul-scraping solo sets. He’d lived up the lifestyle, too, hydrating for the stage with booze. But at the end of 2017, he’d gone sober after recognizing that chunks of his life had disappeared. Recorded a year later, Best of Luck — his third album for Anti- and the first he’d cut with a producer, Ben Harper — seemed poised to push him to new audiences, its mix of wistful acoustic ballads and stomp-around-the-room rock somehow both polished and primal.
Check out the melodically inciting new single, “Driving The Hearse” from Christopher Paul Stelling. Stelling again makes it seem all too easy, creating his own little world of folk expression, luminescent and percolating with life. The artist has it going on, from his vocal charm to suggestive picking style. There is a certain simplicity to folk music that often takes it the distance and Stelling has surely tapped into that lucidity.
“Driving the hearse is a death-chant, it’s a balm, and a soothing warm bath. I’ve always heard certain iconic songwriters describe the rare songs that just showed up, fully formed, as if pulled from some other realm. Sometimes it happens, the veil things and we can almost reach through and over and bring something back. But at what cost? What are we cheating? Or is that the game? Taking charge, driving the hearse, pushing through, plowing forward, this is the way to make our place, to make our bed. It’s in how we live our lives that we’ll be remembered, hopefully.”
