Al Lewis - Fifteen Years - CD DIGIPAK

It was the death of his father that set a 21-year-old Al Lewis on the path to becoming a singer-songwriter. “It was a pivotal moment,” Lewis remembers. Yet it would be years before he could bring himself to put the great loss of his life into song. Indeed, it took Lewis a decade-and-a-half to even begin processing it. When his father died, Lewis had been a young man, without the emotional toolset to make sense of the feelings that were overwhelming him. Few of his friends had experience of bereavement, or any idea of how to help Lewis. During lockdown, Lewis finally decided to sort through all of his Dad’s old possessions, which he’d packed away in the attic of his father’s bungalow after his death, and which had remained there, untouched, for 15 years. Among the dusty, discarded boxes he found treasures from his Dad’s past, from before Lewis knew him; paperwork relating to his parents’ divorce and how his Dad struggled with his illness; relics that sketched out the dreams his Dad pursued in the years after his diagnosis, offering glimpses of an inner life Lewis had never known. “It was bittersweet,” Lewis says. “But it helped me sketch in the man. I felt like I knew him better afterwards.” Shortly afterwards, the songs that would become the album ’Fifteen Years’ came tumbling out of Lewis. It was his first attempt at making sense of the grief he’d been running from for a decade-and-a-half, at reasoning with the loss that had directed his life for so long. Songs exploring questions that had come to Lewis unbidden since he’d become a father himself. “I didn’t instantly think, ‘Okay, this is an album about grief then, let’s do it’,” he explains. “But then a few more songs followed, along the same theme. I’d just become a Dad myself, and I was ruminating on the cyclical nature of life, and how the man I saw in the mirror now looked more like my Dad than I ever had.” The songs that compose the album Fifteen Years speak clearly and from the heart. Lewis feels no need to dress up these stories with pretention, extravagant metaphors or distracting language, instead drawing upon the substance of his loss, the wisdom yielded by the passage of time, and the comfort he’s drawn from his own family and from finally grappling with his grief. Across these songs, Lewis initiates conversations with the father he lost too young, searching for the answers that elude him, and “seeking advice from the ghost of you”, as he sings in ‘Where Do I Go From Here’. He imagines the mindset of his newly divorced Dad as he started his life over again; he recognises the elements of his father he sees in himself, and in the children who never got to meet their grandfather. Singing with a voice rich and emotive, composed of chord changes and melodies that are resonant, aching but always climbing towards resolution and uplift, the result is Lewis’s most personal, most powerful album yet. Once again, Lewis has found in songwriting the catharsis he needed. “I'm in a better place with my grief now,” he says, of the process that began with clearing his Dad’s possessions from the attic, and resulted in this remarkable cycle of songs. But his reasons for releasing the album, for sharing these songs, go deeper than simply making peace with his loss. “Releasing an album like this, I want to reach anyone who finds themselves in the same place I did, navigating unthinkable loss and trying to ride out the experience of grief,” he continues. “I’d hope anyone out there going through something similar might listen to these songs and realised that they’re not alone in this journey.”