There is a version of loneliness that isn’t dramatic — no slammed doors, no 3 a.m. phone calls — just the particular quiet of a Tuesday afternoon when the light goes flat and you can’t remember the last time you said something true to another person. Andy Shauf has made a career of that version, and Sometimes, the Blues Is Just a Passing Bird is eight songs of it, recorded in the tender aftermath of his 2020 album The Neon Skyline.
These tracks were cut during the same Regina, Saskatchewan sessions that produced The Neon Skyline, and Shauf engineered and produced everything himself, which is the only way to explain how personal the sound feels. There’s no committee here. No one told him to fatten the low end or clarify the mix for streaming. The whole thing breathes at its own pace, which is slow, and trusts you to sit still for it.
One Man, Many Instruments
Shauf plays nearly everything on this record — piano, clarinet, guitar, bass, drums, the woodwinds that curl around his vocal lines like smoke from a candle no one bothered to blow out. That’s been his practice since The Bearer of Bad News and before, but here the arrangements feel even more deliberately small. A guitar figure resolves in a way that sounds almost wrong, then reveals itself as exactly right. The clarinet, which could easily feel precious, instead sounds like someone humming without realizing they’re doing it.
The title track stops you cold. Four minutes of Shauf at his least adorned, his voice sitting right at the front of the room, and that title doing the work of an entire poem. It doesn’t explain the blues. It just relocates them — makes them something that comes through and keeps going, if you let it.
The Weight of the Quiet
“Wasted on You” has a chorus that arrives like a sentence you’ve been trying to finish for weeks. It’s not about a woman, exactly, or not only — it’s about the particular shame of wanting something badly and watching yourself do it badly anyway. Shauf writes in that register more honestly than almost anyone working in folk-adjacent song right now, which is an opinion I’ll stand behind.
“Clove Cigarette” stretches past seven minutes and earns every one of them. The song develops like a short story, unhurried, the way a short story by someone who actually reads short stories would. You think you know where it’s going. You don’t.
What distinguishes this collection from a standard B-sides dump is coherence. These eight songs have a temperature, and it holds. They were always their own thing — not leftovers but a companion piece, a different angle on the same streetlight. Shauf described them as songs that didn’t fit the narrative arc of The Neon Skyline, which says something about how seriously he thinks about sequence and shape. The fact that they feel this complete anyway says something about the depth of the well he was drawing from that year.
Put this on with the lights low. Don’t skip ahead.