Sylvie‘s New Season opens on someone else’s song, and it comes from Montreal. Are You Coming? first appeared on Back at the Beginning, the early-1970s album by D’Arcy, the project of Montreal-born songwriter Darcy Draper. He made it at the city’s Studio Six with players including Jerry Mercer and Rayburn Blake of Mashmakhan. CHOM-FM played it, and it has never been reissued. Ben Schwab plays the song bright and unhurried, on acoustic guitar and pedal steel, with the breeziness of early Crosby, Stills & Nash. The record that follows is built the same way, out of other people’s voices, and for most of its length that warmth is reason enough to stay.
Schwab, the Los Angeles writer and producer behind Sylvie, made most of the record alone in his home studio, the way he made the project’s self-titled mini-LP, then took it to Abbey Road to finish. It is his first full-length and his first release for Ghostly International, out since 6 November 2026. He arranges and produces every song and gives most of the lead vocals away. Several tracks are credited to “Ben Schwab and friends”, and the friends are folk and country singers with strong voices of their own. The sequence runs like a day: the first side is up and moving, the second turns toward night.
Not Looking Back Anymore, written with Allyson Yarrow Pierce, has the slow pace of a Sunday morning, with flugelhorn, cornet and trumpet easing it along. Then comes Rina. Schwab’s late father, John Schwab, wrote it for his 1970s Los Angeles band Mad Anthony, and the original leaned toward Leon Russell. The new version, sung by Alex Amen, is softer at every edge, dressed in strings, brass and pedal steel. “It was tough to record because I wanted to honor the original my dad wrote while bringing something new to it,” Schwab said when the song was released.
The title track is woozy but tightly played, with something sad running underneath it, until a choir arrives near the end and the song opens right out. Schwab’s own voice turns up here, brief and balmy, then slips back to the edges of his own record. He is a generous host, and the cost is that the songs can settle into a single soft mood.
You and Me is a small folk tune in the manner of Paul McCartney; Blackbird is the obvious relative. On Wish I Could Tell You, Schwab shares a psych-folk duet with Kacy Lee Anderson of Kacy & Clayton.
The two biggest guests come late. Courtney Marie Andrews takes Guiding Star, a piano ballad that gives thanks for a friendship, and sings it with the reach of Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt. Sierra Ferrell brings a bluegrass singer’s clarity to California Hills. The piano leads, the horns are pure Burt Bacharach, and the melody climbs the way a Carole King chorus does. Ferrell is singing about a landscape two people once shared, and the gap one of them has left in it.
New Season was released on 6 November 2026 via Ghostly International.
Photo: Jackie Lee Young
Share this :
