BobKat, made up of the duo of Bob Davoli and Kathleen Parks, has announced a new album of original songs, Longing for Afterglow, for late spring/early summer coming up. This marks Davoli’s fifth album in total, including the John Prine tribute, Hello Out There. While Davoli continues to follow many of the same themes and moods for his new album it also reflects his desire to explore new territory.
Bob Davoli and collaborator Kathleen Parks, who sings and plays violin, are at the heart of the music. While they’ve been working together since 2021, they have been playing as a duo in recent years. Longing for Afterglow keeps Davoli and Parks at the core of the project, but it also brings in the mind of multiple Grammy-winning producer, guitarist, and singer/songwriter Joe Henry, who in turn deploys his stellar crew of Levon Henry on reeds, David Piltch on upright bass, and Patrick Warren on various keyboard instruments, including an obscure proto-Mellotron called a Chamberlin. On some tracks, they are also joined by guitarist Julian Lage, prized for his transcendent approach.
Today we’re very pleased to premier the song and video for “Elusive Underbellies” from the new album here on Wildfire Music + News.
The song’s atmosphere is an excellent combination of Davoli and Parks setting a meditative and reflective tone, and our instrumentalists filling out the track with a breadth of reach, casting a distinctive spell. Through some use of repetition in the phrase “Life is a beautiful sunrise/ Until you must face the sunset,” the song guides the audience through beautiful, associated details that we might encounter in life, many drawn from the natural world, but some simply from human society. But then it also throws in the occasional curve ball of darker imagery. And the repeated phrase itself indicates an underlying reality, that all this alluring comfort around us does have a closing date. One little phrase that sums it all up in the song is “Beware of contentment”. This resonates firmly with the sound of the song and the idea that contentment can be lulling and carry us along as we lose our motivation to spend our time alive wisely. Davoli and Parks tread that interesting line between being celebratory of the beauty of life and dead serious about the end of life approaching us all at one time or another.
Our video for “Elusive Underbellies”, a song where the title is a surprise reference in the song that we won’t spoil for you, knits together gentle montages of the natural world, focusing around the play of light, details from life, and footage of Davoli and Parks enjoying everyday experiences. There’s also some interspersed live play footage. The video has definitely been created with mood in mind, helping ease the audience through some of the imagery being suggested by the song, and creating the feeling of contentment that’s the underlying tone of the piece. Having such a pleasant visual backdrop actually helps accentuate the few grittier lyrics in the song and delivers that contrast between the ideas of the hope and expectation of sunrise and the reverie and reality of sunset that much more effectively.
BobKat shares about the new song:
This a stream of consciousness song with a lot of free association about the human condition and reckoning with mortality.
The songs on Longing for Afterglow show greater vulnerability than those on Davoli’s previous albums. Almost all of the new songs proceed by “focusing on the nature of one person, then radiating out to human nature in general, then radiating out some more to actual “nature” itself, of which humans are but one small part, as one person is a tiny fraction of humanity.”
Bob Davoli has won 48 awards in national and international songwriting contests (including the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in December 2021 for his song “Transistor Radio and Me”), and he’s done so in barely 7 years.
Davoli, who is in his mid-70s, took a unique journey to arrive on the eve of releasing his fourth album of original material (with previous albums totaling over 60 original songs). After a career of success in the realm of investment ventures, he moved into songwriting later in life. Since penning his first original song at the age of 59, Davoli has steadily been making up for lost time. Working with decades of real-life experience and many musical influences, he shows no sign of slowing down.
