Tyler Ballgame’s For The First Time, Again reviewed: characterisation and candid expressionism on songwriter’s debut

Personal disclosure and pop music have long been intertwined, but audience expectation of the former is now almost vampiric – the closer to the bone the more toothsome, it seems. On the debut from Rhode Island native Tyler Perry, autobiographical candour lands very differently, with more modesty than melodrama and along the lines of ’60s-’70s croon pop and classic rock, rather than modern maximalism. With a superbly modulated swoop that echoes Orbison and Elvis, the singer-songwriter, now based in LA, voices dejectedness, yearning and lack of self-acceptance but also the relief won through uncynical sharing.

There’s more to For The First Time, Again than personal truth-telling with a vintage flavour, though. As realised by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado – whose production credits include The Killers, The Lemon Twigs and Miley Cyrus – and musician Ryan Pollie (aka Los Angeles Police Department), the material evinces its own kind of indie-fied romanticism, borne of what Perry has described as the need for “experiences we can surrender to”. Recorded live in an analogue studio by players including Rado and Pollie, the set leans on keyboards, organ and acoustic guitar while summoning the ghosts not only of Elvis and Orbison but also Lennon, Lee Hazlewood, Nilsson and more surprisingly, Bowie in his glam era. Or maybe not so surprisingly, given the repertoire of several hundred songs that Perry amassed in his years spent playing local bars as a covers singer, before fate threw him a lifeline.

These 12 songs see their author in the slightly odd position of having transcended the situations to which they relate, though that hardly devalues his experience. Perry’s origin story is the stuff of a biopic, arcing as it does from living in his mother’s basement, aged 29 and depressed, to moving to a city he’d never visited (LA) to take up a random job in recruitment, and there being offered studio time and expertise by a producer (Rado) who’d clocked the singer’s clip of a backyard performance on Instagram. The ministrations of a counsellor and Alan Watts’ teachings also figure. It’s a narrative that might smother Perry’s artistry, were he not so vocally gifted or alert to the pitfalls of stylistic over-familiarity and characterisation (named after a venerable Boston Red Sox baseball player, “Ballgame” is a confident performer of Perry’s own imagining).

The record opens with the title track and an acoustic melody that takes its cue from “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” before Perry’s voice descends, golden, gossamer light and filled with melancholic soul. He muses on rediscovering in LA what he’d left behind in Rhode Island – “Well, I knew you once, I knew [SIC] you now/I’ve known you forever” – pausing to admit Rado’s brief, Byrds-ish guitar coda. “I Believe In Love” follows. The first song Perry wrote in the knowledge that it was for an album, it’s a big, lazily brimming ode to being in love with love, which nods to solo Lennon and is tricked out with piano trills and ’70s guitar vamps.

The spirits of Elvis and Nilsson hover over spangled, heavy-hearted piano ballad “You’re Not My Baby Tonight”, but it’s all change for the weirdly gung-ho “Matter Of Taste”, with its whiff of Meat Loaf clinging to countrified bar rock. That title is apt but so is that of “Sing How I Feel”. A tremulous, velveteen swipe at Orbison with Bad Seeds organ detail and the feel of a cinematic western, it has Perry declaring, “I only love when I’m able/So many nights on the road/I put my cards upon the table/Like I’m saving a soul”. Playfulness is given free rein on the trumpet- and saxophone-flecked “Got A New Car” and a dreamy “Ooh”, with its syncopated rhythms and improv sax. The heavily reverbed and Lana Del Rey-ish “Deepest Blue” intrigues as an anguished (almost) belter with indie-folk roots, before Perry bows out with “Waiting So Long”. Here, a serving of New Orleans honky-tonk comes with a country side and wry lyrics to match: “Broke my mirror about seven years back now/Still getting over the pain/Mistook you for my reflection/Won’t make that mistake again”.

For The First Time, Again isn’t quite the coup de foudre it promises. The recontextualising of old-school power crooners via commercial rock and pop, country/Americana and glam doesn’t always hit, despite Perry’s and Rado’s obvious affinities. At times (“Matter Of Taste, “Got A New Car”), the inventiveness lands with a clunk. However, it’s a generous record, emotionally fearless and thoroughly likeable on first listen, while Perry’s voice can’t help but convince. He’s only just begun.