Magic and mystery pervade Trooper’s latest
“Incident on Willow Street,” Greg Trooper’s new album, is packaged with a cover that suggests a vintage pulp novel with a barefoot blond woman sneaking down a stairway. There’s a little tag line, too: “In a world that’s strange and unkind she finds magic and mystery.”
That phrase captures many of the 12 new songs from the singer-songwriter, whose characters are generally not doing their best but finding little victories where they can. Opener “All the Way to Amsterdam” likely has the most sympathetic character, a young girl in Texas suffering an abusive father. She keeps books and a flashlight under her bed and thinks about the frozen canals in Amsterdam.
“The things under her bed keep the dream alive that she’ll get out of this situation,” says Trooper, 57, who will play the new songs and others from the past three decades Friday at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck. “Her perfect fantasy is being able to skate down these canals. That she’s in Texas, the idea of skating to Amsterdam just makes it seem that much farther away.”
In other songs, Trooper documents characters losing at love in varying degrees. “Good Luck Heart” isn’t, as the title implies, about a charm or a heart that finds good fortune. Instead, the song is a kiss-off after, Trooper says, “she took his heart and split.”
It’s an upbeat song, nevertheless. Trooper says it’s important to him to “always leave a window open for all these characters to improve their situation. I’ve always found that to be something I liked when I read other people or listen to other people’s music: finding that tender moment where there’s the possibility of redemption. That’s what I tried to capture in these songs. I don’t know if that’s what I accomplished, but it’s what I attempted.
“I can’t take myself too seriously all the time or become one of these characters. So everything is pretty much character driven. I feel I have to point that out sometimes. I like to tell people I write reality-based fiction. My life would be a terrible bore to write about, so I invent these characters.”
A New Jersey native, Trooper recently relocated to the New York area after 13 years in Nashville. There he found inspiration for a character in “Mary of the Scots in Queens,” one of the album’s more upbeat songs. It draws some of its sound from old British folk.
“I moved into a very Irish neighborhood, and we went to this very big Irish wedding,” he says. “At the wedding the priest walks by, and then the police band with the piper marches through at the reception, and suddenly the groom’s mother grabs a bagpipe and starts marching with the band. Turns out she worked at the precinct with the guys in the band. I thought, ‘There’s got to be a song in there somewhere.’
“It’s kind of a fantastic story, but, in a way, it’s also a very real story.”