Having toiled in the shadows for much of his long, varied career, Michael Chapman enjoyed a heartening and well-deserved renaissance in his later years. Before passing away at the age of 80 in September 2021, some of his best records were reissued by the tastemaking Light In The Attic label; Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done, a 2012 Tompkins Square tribute album, saw his songs lovingly covered by such diverse talents as Lucinda Williams, Thurston Moore and Maddy Prior; and he toured relentlessly, sharing stages with younger musicians like Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Bill Callahan and more, who looked to Chapman not just as a link to the past, but as a still-vital creative entity. Indeed, 2017’s 50 and 2019’s True North, both produced by Gunn, were dark-tinged late-period masterworks, showing that Chapman’s songwriting and guitar work were undimmed by age.
That celebration from players often less than half his age was fuel for Chapman’s fire in his latter days. “Michael was always delighted by anyone rediscovering his music,” says his partner of more than 50 years, Andru Chapman. “But more so with the likes of Ryley Walker, Steve Gunn and William Tyler publicly acknowledging his influence – not just musically, as a person too.”
Chapman wasn’t interested in simply fading away into a comfortable nostalgic existence. He was working right up until the end, still looking for new ways to move forward. One of his final projects was Another Fish, an electrified sequel to Fish, the instrumental record released via Tompkins Square in 2015. These sketches briefly emerged digitally a couple of years back, but they’ve now been further fleshed out on Another Tide, a posthumous team-up with Brisbane-based banjo adventurist Andrew Tuttle.
For musicians, it’s always a bit of a gamble to embark on projects like this, where the ultimate intentions of an artist can’t be known. Are you there to “finish” the departed player’s works, somehow forcing them into their final form? How can you embellish sensitively without overstepping the bounds and losing the original spirit of the thing? Fans still argue over attempts like Alice Coltrane’s orchestral overdubs on her late husband’s recordings, or the remaining Beatles’ occasional exhuming of John Lennon’s demos over the decades. In some cases, it might be better to leave well enough alone.
Tuttle wisely sidesteps these issues. Another Tide isn’t so much a completion of Another Fish (which Basin Rock has usefully included on a second disc here, for those who want to hear Chapman unadorned) as it is a conversation with it. Tuttle is an inspired choice. An inquisitive and imaginative soul, his 2022 LP Fleeting Adventure saw him collaborating remotely with a far-flung selection of musicians from across the globe; somehow, the results managed to sound as intimate as if they were all sitting in a room together. Those skills are put to great use on Another Tide, with Tuttle taking Chapman’s raw materials and forging something brand new out of them, sometimes hewing closely to the originals, sometimes taking them into another galaxy entirely. What we’re left with is something that doesn’t quite fit into any particular box – like Chapman himself really. The press materials describe it as a hybrid: “part remix album, part cover album, both a solo work and a collaboration, of sorts.”
If that all sounds a little overly ambiguous, don’t worry. Another Tide, regardless of context, is marvelous. The record begins with the homespun fanfare of intertwining banjos, happily recalling Bruce Langhorne’s classic The Hired Hand OST, an almost orchestral drone wafting above. “Five And Twenty Days For Lunch”, meanwhile, is the tune Tuttle feels best represents the “synthesis of the different approaches of creating this new album in that it samples Michael’s original guitar, includes banjo improvisations that came about through playing and learning his originals, and brings in some new effects and synthesised sounds that I wouldn’t have expected to include when first thinking of how to recreate this particular song.” Out of this surprise and delight arises a gorgeous piece of music, a true dialogue between Tuttle and Chapman.
Though he got his start playing in folk clubs, Chapman was an experimental musician by nature, and nowhere is that better shown than in the remarkable “Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons”, which closes out Another Tide in fine fashion. Chapman’s original was a dizzying labyrinth of echo-plexed guitars in the manner of John Martyn’s “Outside In” or Manuel Göttsching. Tuttle takes the krautrock flavours even further, with hypnotic Tangerine Dream-ish accents cohering around Michael’s manic melodies. It ends up sounding like nothing else in either Chapman or Tuttle’s respective oeuvres – and there’s where the magic lies.
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