Paul Weller? He’s never been better

TRUE MEANINGS

In the City, the Jam’s fierce 1977 debut, introduced Paul Weller as an 18-yearold from the commuterbelt town of Woking in Surrey, desperate to join the urban riot of punk. Forty-one years later, Weller’s 26th studio album – after six with the Jam, six with the Style Council and 13 others solo – could well have been called In the Country.

It is his most bucolic and pastoral work, balancing folky guitars, orchestral strings and mellifluous horns, with Weller crooning in his softest, most gently modulated tones. And yet, at the age of 60, a fire still burns within him. “To find true meanings/ And patterns in things” is how Weller defines his personal quest on the ruminative Aspects, a gorgeous ballad that seeks in the natural world a sense of inner peace, an escape from “the crippling aspects/ Of a life with no rhyme.”

Paul Weller Parlophone

Weller has been so visible in the British music scene for so long, that he is in danger of becoming part of the furniture. His blokeish manner, preference for roots rock and soul styles and adherence to old-fashioned notions of songcraft and instrumental virtuosity have helped characterise him as the Modfather, a gruff elder statesman of a brand of British guitar music sometimes disparagingly referred to as Dad Rock.

Yet such easy pigeonholing belies the sheer range and quality of Weller’s work, which in recent years has encompassed jagged rock experimentalism and lush psychedelia.

The folky aspect has been present as far back as English Rose from the Jam’s 1978 classic All Mod Cons, surfacing again, more fully, on 1992’s Wild Wood. Here, Weller gives it full rein, but while True Meanings may well be his most laid back album, it never descends into mushy sentimentality. Every one of its 14 elegant songs is as sharp as a diamond.

Unusually, Weller has sought out lyrical collaborators, with contributions from Irish songwriter Conor O’Brien of Villagers (on scene-setting opening track The Soul Searchers) and three songs (Bowie, Wishing Well and the moving final number White Horses) with lyrics by Erland

It may be his most bucolic album yet, but all 14 songs are diamond-sharp

Cooper of folk rock band Erland and the Carnival.

Yet the writing throughout maintains the same personal, straight-talking, self-examining tone.

It is not as if Weller himself has run out of things to say. He offers some of his finest ever lyrics on Books (pondering the misuse of religious texts) and the elegiac What Would He

Say?, subtle, pensive songs expressing disquiet at the state of the world (“it only takes a spark to start a war”).

Many older artists lose their creative edge as they soften into middle age, making musically pleasing work their younger selves would have disdained.

The toughness of Weller’s art remains fully present here. An album of beauty and depth, True Meanings is further affirmation of a particularly sincere and probing talent, for whom music is a vocation rather than a career.

LEADING LIGHTAt 60, Weller retains his creative edge