Our Back Pages

Chris Stamey left the dBs in 1982, but fate and the desire to maintain a successful collaboration keeps bringing him back to the orbit of his former bandmate Peter Holsapple. The two have been friends since grade school, and in 1991, they reunited to cut a semi-acoustic album, Mavericks, that was more subtle and less angular than the dBs best-known work but still documented their musical chemistry and their gift for harmonies. They occasionally crossed creative paths again after that, and issued a second album as a duo in 2009, Here and Now. A full-fledged dBs reunion record, Falling Off the Sky, came out in 2012, and nine years on, we have another Holsapple & Stamey set, 2021s Our Back Pages. As the title suggests, this time Holsapple & Stamey are taking a second look at some songs they recorded in the past, mostly from the first two dBs albums, but the spare, evocative, primarily acoustic arrangements give the tunes a different feel, and the passage of time seems to have allowed the songwriters to find new wrinkles in the tunes. (There is one previously unheard selection, Depth of Field, which was written for the 1982 dBs LP Repercussion but never made the cut, though it sounds lovely in this version. Theres also one track, Nothing is Wrong, taken from a live performance by the dBs.) Here, Molly Says sounds more rueful than grumpy, Happenstance takes on the voice of someone who knows just how much they want to hurt someone, Big Brown Eyes is romantic in a deeper and more mature way, and Picture Sleeve is a sweetly rueful look back at how a younger man falls in love. Its not uncommon for artists to re-record older material because theyve run out of ideas, but in Our Back Pages, Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey show they have plenty of great ideas as they rework these older tunes. From a distance of a few decades, they know more about themselves and the characters they wrote about, and that wisdom, coupled with some stellar harmonies, makes Our Back Pages a delight even if youre not well versed on the original versions of the songs. ~ Mark Deming