Time Before the Fall

Folk-rock singer/songwriter Dave Nachmanoff shares with his mentor and sometime-employer Al Stewart (who joins in on the vocals to "The Invader") an interest in writing about history, and on his eighth album, he writes and sings story songs that may be entirely fictional or represent historical fiction. He can be topical in the sense of getting his subject matter out of the newspaper, but he isn't really a protest singer in the usual sense. Homelessness is a subject that engages him, however, and he addresses it in "George's Corner," as he has in previous songs. He tends to relate current matters to Biblical ones, as he does on the title song and in "Idols," which mixes the story of Moses with the Rodney King beating of 1992. In the historical fiction category are "Judas Kiss," sung in the voice of the brother of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who turned him in, and "When I See You Again," which sounds at first like it might be an autobiographical song about a man on the road missing his family, but turns out to be an imagined account by a passenger on the 9/11 plane that fought back against the terrorist hijackers and crashed in Pennsylvania. Nachmanoff plays most of the instruments on the album (Michael Jerome Moore contributes drums and percussion, and there are a few other guest singers and musicians here and there), creating good folk-rock arrangements and fingerpicking his guitar especially well. As usual, he is aiming for craftsmanship in his songs, expressing his personal feelings indirectly, with results that are sometimes impressive, and at other times pedestrian.