Daniel Young

There's a heft to the light in the early evening, when every easterly surface shines. That mayfly incandescence, where nothing gold can stay, though it might flash long enough for you to touch its flaming tail. That's the light Daniel Young captures on Another Golden Hour: it was absorbed on the side patio where the songs were born, carried to the basement where they were magnetized, and it's now refracted back to the air around our heads, where those same songs will fade and be reborn. A small resurrection, a rotational miracle; another day, another golden hour. Recorded at Orchard Studios over a two-day session with only a handful of overdubs, Young worked once again with the Rambling Roses, the same crew he had along for 2024's Leave It Out to Dry. These songs extend Young's abiding interests—and the crazy quilt of his life and times: "Baby, Baby Blue" is a tribute to the dearly departed KSOP (AM 1370), a seventy-year veteran of the good fight of country music and its amplitude modulations; "Holdin' Up" is an earnest question issued to the new depression; "Fires Shall Be Ceased" and "Ways to Communicate" draw on the righteous, rangy energy of a protest tradition that reaches back to Woody Guthrie and the ghosts of Joe Hill that haunt the Wasatch; the title cut is a wavey, dripping distillation of all the sounds that have been trailing Young over the years. Another Golden Hour is a bid for hard-earned hope. You better believe it.