A Certain Distance

Dave Nachmanoff, a sometime-sideman to Al Stewart, gets his employer's help on "The Loyalist," a song on his third CD, with Stewart providing answering lines on the chorus of a composition about Adam Bower, an 18th century ancestor of Nachmanoff's wife, who refused to join the American Revolution and moved to Nova Scotia instead. That gives the tune a similarity to Stewart numbers like "Time Passages" musically and thematically, and "The Loyalist" would make a good alternate title for the album, on which Nachmanoff demonstrates himself to be a faithful husband and father as well as friend and humanitarian. On the other hand, A Certain Distance also seems an appropriate name for the collection. The title song is about a man on the road, perhaps a singer/songwriter, and about the woman who waits for him at home, but there is also "a certain distance" between Nachmanoff and his song subjects throughout. Even this song, which would seem personal, is cast in the third person (it's "he" and "she," not "I" and "you") and elsewhere, Nachmanoff sings story songs for the most part, the only exception being "Real Good Thing," a song of devotion to his wife. When he directs "All Too Human" to "Sophia," he is careful to point out in a footnote to the lyric sheet that this is an abstraction, not a person: "‘Sophia' is the Greek word for "wisdom," he explains, evoking his past as a philosophy instructor. Musically, the album is largely a collaboration with producer Don Conoscenti, who augments Nachmanoff's many instrumental contributions with some of his own. Nachmanoff sings in a reedy tenor sometimes reminiscent of James Taylor, making for a textured folk-pop sound that, along with the songs themselves, is appealing if not deeply moving.