After four studio albums, Dylan LeBlanc has garnered enough insight into his craft to take on the daunting feat of self-producing his own album. Like the understated and made-to-last emblems of quiet luxury, Coyote is a 13-song record of timeless grandeur hidden beneath the quiet introspection LeBlanc’s music is known for. His catalogue is a dominion of self-reflection retold through his calming voice. Resting among the great lyricists of this generation, I continuously return to his albums and each time find a missing piece of myself in them.
Unlike the unaffordable price-tag of quiet luxury, real-life excesses aren’t something LeBlanc is much concerned with. That which can bring us to our knees—humility, and salvation are mainstay themes he has ebbed and flowed with throughout his life and music career. The coyote, the album’s namesake animal, is his latest point of reflection to tell that truth.
After summiting a 100-foot cliff and having a real-life harrowing encounter with a coyote, LeBlanc understood that perilous moment as a dance between human and animal, both just trying to survive. His lyrics originate from a similar precipice, or a razor’s edge as he likes to call it.
Like his former semi-autobiographical albums, Coyote, as a concept deals with his personal struggles to find a way out of a former treacherous lifestyle where he was tormented by his past and endured the pain and regret of lost love and a life wasted, until he found his way towards redemption and freedom. Through masterful storytelling, Coyote seeks resolve to the backdrop of various guitars including slide, haunting keys, and vagabond blues fading into the sunset of Americana-folk wanderlust.
Tracks like “Dark Waters,” and “Forgotten Things” are a window into a life once in a state of never-ending confusion, and on “No Promises Broken” shifts toward maturity and healing with the sense of home he’s found with his fiancé and children. Abating the feeling of emptiness is a meal we all share, and from the basin of the frontier landscape of “Telluride,” LeBlanc laments among one of my favorite choruses on the album, “Ain’t no bright white light/Just an emptiness inside/The last train out of Telluride.” Songs like “Human Kind” and “The Crowd Goes Wild” retrofit ’70s grooves and add an upbeat pace in good taste; a choice that could have easily sounded cliché.
Like LeBlanc’s previous albums, there is an elegance and mystery to Coyote that will continue to reveal itself to the listener, but unlike his previous albums, he self-produced a stunning work of music. Out now on ATO records, Coyote, features a legendary group of session musicians: drummer Fred Eltringham (Ringo Starr, Sheryl Crow), pianist Jim “Moose” Brown (Bob Seger), and bass player Seth Kaufman (Lana Del Rey).
