Milwaukee’s John Stano performs magic on guitar and harmonica, with lyrics that catch the seemingly mundane moments of life with memorable vivacity. He is out with two recent albums, one from a public performance and another at a private studio.
On Live at: The South Shore Farmers Market, the veteran Cream City folkie’s 15-song set attracted a significant crowd amid a bevy of produce and handicrafts shoppers. Some of his numbers derive from his previous albums, a few are dry runs for the more recent Digging Out in the Heartland, and one is a melodically winsome musing on the unusual nature of his playing at such a place as a farmers market. Though it may not have been his usual time for gigging, his voice and guitar mastery are no worse for being employed at an earlier hour. Live closes with a studio-recorded ode to Milwaukee County’s Oak Leaf Trail biking and hiking path, written at the behest of one of the co-authors of a recent book about it.
That number’s ambling groove sounds like a transition to some of the best of Stano’s latest studio effort. Digging Out in the Heartland is a uniformly engaging set of minimal, modern folk. The accompaniment isn’t much more elaborate than his farmers market outing. But it can be memorable when his friends and he make the effort to add more, like the Dixieland clarinet on Stano’s comical grousing about his efforts to get into heaven being met with resistance from St. Peter. In the main, though, Digging balances songs about loneliness, be it as a one-man band or a divorcee, with others about fellowship with his dad or fellow musicians. His vocal resemblance to John Prine may be a plus for some, but Stano’s songwriting voice is his own, apt for the folksinger’s task of chronicling the local while relating it to the universal.
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