Those of us who miss Grant McLennan have this new article by his partner Robert Forster to console us. In uncluttered prose Forster recounts meeting McLennan, an artistic polymath who could have been, according to Forster, a film or book critic. How encouraging to read about a great songwriter for whom reading proved perhaps the only lasting pleasure. Such was his erudition. And melancholy:

He was moody and you always hoped you got him on a good day. Sometimes I'd visit and it would take me over an hour to pull him out. Twice in his life I was with him when he was totally shattered. And there were many years I missed when we weren't in the same city.

Forster correctly notes that the darkness was there, always, shadowing "Cattle & Cane," "Dusty in Here," "Somebody Else's Wife," even "Streets of Your Town," the only nostalgia piece to begin in tranquility and conclude with a regret shaped by an unvarnished acceptance of reality (the "battered wives" with sharpened butcher knives form as much a part of the singer's experience as taking his boat under the bridge). Tracks like 2005's "Finding You" and "The Statue" prove that this fusion was an ideal more tenable than the escape for which so many romantics yearn.