"You know I've never really met someone like you," he sings clumsily, unwittingly pushing her back into the arms of his friend. Instead of winning her over, he tipsily oversteps and self-servingly throws his friend under the bus. "Do you always find the worst in me?"Īt the spine of the album is "Quite Like You," in which Shauf narrates a half-drunken encounter with his best friend's girlfriend, who's upset after another breakup ("I wonder what the hell he did this time?"). "Why do I always find the worst in you?" he wonders. In "The Worst In You," Shauf embodies someone who wrongly assumes that his significant other is cheating when he can't find her at the party. why he found no peace of mind," Shauf sings grimly in "Alexander All Alone," amid a steady tick-tock plinking of piano.Ĭonsidering the songs' rotating first-person viewpoints, Shauf also employs these archetypes as stand-ins to consider his personal faults - and even portray the loneliness and claustrophobia that can come with living in a small town.
"Alexander wondered why no life flashed before his eyes. The recurring characters the Saskatchewan songwriter and multi-instrumentalist renders are rough but familiar approximations of people he knows: There's a dude who awkwardly shows up before anyone else ("Early To The Party"), a person who admits buried truths that blur the line between friendship and attraction ("To You"), a woman who dances by herself without fear ("Eyes Of Them All"), and a guy who collapses and dies after swearing off smoking. Throughout the record's 10 songs, Shauf sings with a wallflower's remove and knowing specificity.
#ANDY SHAUF SERIES#
If you were to document it all from afar, who might you see? What might you overhear? On his new album The Party, Andy Shauf puts himself in that exact position, as he crafts a series of connected vignettes that offer up tiny observations from a single night. Most of us have been to the kind of crowded house parties where you hang back and people-watch in relative anonymity.
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