Album Review: Brooks & Bowskill, Too Many Roads

Occasionally, things that sound good on paper also end up sounding good for real. Witness Too Many Roads, from homegrown singer-songwriters Brittany Brooks and Jim Bowskill. The album is hugely notable for three reasons conceptually and about a gazillion sonically. 

Paper first. The pair are not only newly established musical partners, but they are also romantic partners, which means every song on their full-length debut feels laden with import, real or imagined, which also makes it feel intimate, like peering through a half-drawn curtain at night.

The second is that Too Many Roads is a record store clerk’s nightmare, which makes it a thrill. Part folk, part Americana, part country, sometimes a rich amalgamation of all three and at once forward-looking yet somehow retro, the album flatly refuses to conform to one genre. Instead, it follows whatever path a song’s lyrics or melody confer with heads-down resolution and absolute success. Try filing that effectively, Junior. 

Finally — duh! — the album features Brooks and Bowskill; she a wildly talented songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (see the towering Lend Me Your Hand from 2020), he a wildly talented multi-instrumentalist and songwriter (see his work with Blue Rodeo and the Sheepdogs). Together, they are a musical force of nature, soaring through this lovely collection of highly visual songs with an effortlessness that belies its obvious craftsmanship helmed by Bowskill, who produced.

Album opener “Little Gem” is truth in advertising, perfectly described by the pair as “an intimate candlelit ballad where the couple’s vocals melt like butter over the warmest acoustic guitar, rhythmic bongo and swaying cellos.” 

Lyrics lead the charge here. “Heart Breaker” brings the hootenanny with Bowskill sorrowfully itemizing his self-medicating protocols in the aftermath of a split. That’s matched by “Tired of the Talk,” which finds a slow-burning Brooks meeting Bowskill shot for shot, missive for missive, before the track — co-written with Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor — grandly blooms into a kind of aural “fuck you” complete with an orchestral send-off. 

Really, every song on Too Many Roads deserves its own loquacious description. But why write when you can just listen? Albums don’t come prettier or more compelling. 

Too Many Roads was released January 12, 2023.
Listen to it here.