For those unaware, Award-winning, Toronto-based singer-songwriter Julian Taylor has just released his next album, Beyond the Reservoir, on October 14th, 2022, via his Howling Turtle, Inc. label, with distribution via Warner Music/ADA.

Co-produced by Taylor and longtime production partner/collaborator Saam Hashemi, mixed by Hashemi, and mastered by Noah Mintz, Beyond the Reservoir was recorded at three studio locations — Canterbury, The Fireside Studio, and The Woodshed.

“I really enjoyed writing and producing this new album,” Taylor says. “I dug down deep. It’s extremely personal like my last record, and I’ve taken that to heart. It took me longer to write this piece of art, and I think that I was learning and teaching myself so many things along the way.”

“I’ve realized that by sharing my personal truth and the stories of my life, as they are and were, is a real gift to myself and to others. It’s not easy to love ourselves, and it’s not easy to love in general. I have a difficult time with it, and as I shed my own skin to reveal that kind of vulnerability, I find it connects me to the human experience in a more meaningful way.”

1. Moonlight
2. Murder 13
3. It Hurts (Everyone Was There)
4. Wide Awake
5. Seeds
6. Stolen Lands
7. I Am A Tree
8. Moving
9. Opening the Sky
10. 100 Proof [Bonus Track]

This beautifully crafted, melodically Americana new album opens on the gracefully pleasing tale within Moonlight and the storytelling of Murder 13, and they are then followed by the gentle hop-skip-bounce of It Hurts (Everyone Was There), the congenial Wide Awake (which examines the forward-looking reverie of embracing one’s ingrained familial experiences), and the John Mellencamp-esque S.E.E.D.S. (a song powered by strife, loss, and discontent, but one that grasps firmly to hope and redemption).

Along next is the sterner recounting of reflection in the form of Stolen Lands (where he explores his own heritage as an Afro-Indigenous person, tracing stories of dispossession, cultural genocide, and police brutality), which is itself backed by the low slung folk of I Am A Tree, the aching, albeit melodic yearn within Moving, the album closing on the gently furtive, at first, boisterous and upturned rhythms thereafter of Opening The Sky (equal parts loving fatherly advice and a forever promise, written as a message to his daughter) and the so-called acoustic guitar bonus track, 100 Proof.

Beyond the Reservoir’s name is grounded in a specific geographical touchstone Taylor fondly recalls from the not-entirely halcyon days of his teenage youth in Ontario. “I used to hang out at a place in Toronto called the St. Clair Reservoir. If my last album, The Ridge, was a childhood record in a lot of ways, Beyond the Reservoir is an adolescence record – a coming-of-age story – about moving into adulthood. Beyond the Reservoir is an album that addresses identity, loss, sadness, hope, and redemption, and the themes of resilience, courage, and strength are prevalent in every carefully chosen lyric.”

“It contains a gentle spiritual thread that runs throughout the album, touching on each of the elements like fire, water, air, and earth as they relate to humanity. It has this infinite sadness to it, but it also has this infinite hope to it as well. It is a beautifully orchestrated successor to The Ridge. It’s compelling, like a book you can’t put down.”

Joining Taylor, who played acoustic guitar, piano, and hand drum, on the album were returning pianist/multi-instrumentalist Derek Downham and two of Taylor’s cousins — Gene Diabo on drums, and Barry Diabo on bass.

Due to certain pandemic-related travel restrictions at the time of recording, Taylor additionally deployed some other musicians to lend their talents to the Reservoir process, amongst them being drummer Shamaka Ali, electric and upright bassist Anna Ruddick, pedal-steel guitarist Burke Carroll, and fiddler Miranda Mulholland, with Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther providing backing vocals, and string arrangements by Michael Peter Olsenis performed by Aya Miyagawa, Sarah Valasco, and Eslin Mckay (violin), Maxime Despax (viola), and Erika Nelson (cello).

Nine profoundly interpersonal songs form Beyond the Reservoir. As aurally bountiful and topically deep as The Ridge truly was, Beyond the Reservoir raises the overall artistic ante considerably.

Thanks to songs like the starkly restless narrative of “Murder 13” and the no-holds-barred reclamation declarations of “Stolen Lands” — not to mention the resilient backbone at the taproot of “Seeds” and the magnanimous firmament of freedom and wisdom celebrated in “I Am a Tree” — the sheer breadth of Reservoir finds Taylor planting a stake for taking his rightful place as one of the most insightful and personally affecting songwriters and performers of the first quarter of the 21st century.

As bleak as some of the channels certain Reservoir songs must travel are, the joys found within the down-home transformative stretch of “Moonlight” and the forward-looking reverie of embracing one’s ingrained familial experiences in “Wide Awake” only serve to add to the album’s widescreen look at the world sprawl that’s around us.

It all leads to the uplifting album-denouement signpost that is the acoustified final track “Opening the Sky,” which was written explicitly by Taylor as a treatise for his pre-teen daughter to champion the idea of how you can do anything, no matter what the world at large puts in your path. “What I’m saying to her here is, it’s ok to keep going,” he explains.

“Ultimately, I hope my work helps people relate to their own humanity,” Taylor says. The inherent compassion and humanity entrenched all throughout Beyond the Reservoir clearly show Taylor is well in tune with the soul of his restless muse in a way that’s personally relatable to everyone who’s listening.

To borrow a line from “Moonlight,” it’s an album that captures the moments that changed just about everything. Beyond the Reservoir is a justly attained artistic apex by a duly established career artist still looking over the rim to see where he can take us, and himself, next.

Murder 13 by Julian Taylor [Official Video]

S.E.E.D.S. by Julian Taylor [Official Video]

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