Album Review: Something Old, Something New

Covenant alum consults the dead on SIP album

Withington spent much of his summer producing his new album

Love’s Best Habit is the brainchild of Covenant alum Grant Withington, as well as his SIP in English two academic years ago. This past summer Withington finally mastered the CD. The final product is quite an experiment, and I mean that in the best way.

As experiments go, Love’s Best Habit is surprisingly even keel. Conceptually, Withington’s plan was to take a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets and set them to contemporary music. What we get is a collection of eleven singer-songwriter ballads that takes 400-year-old poems and makes them feel poignant again.

The trick is that Shakespeare’s sonnets are still as particular in their relevance and as universal in their scope as today’s lyricists are, and even more so. The sonnets were written towards the end of Shakespeare’s lifetime, so he often writes with a weathered tone, covering topics like companionship, regret, and mortality with a certain grandfatherly air. Withington builds his experiment off the premise that these themes are inherent to the human condition, letting the words speak for themselves. He pulls it off with grace.
The somber arrangements bring out the sonnets’ retrospective mood. Withington enlists the help of a number of Covenant students and alumni, including brother Ben Withington on synth, alumnus Asher Payne on backup vocals and senior Josh Barrett on drums. Mixed and mastered in North Carolina by Riley Miller, these contributions blend together seamlessly, creating a beautiful sound reminiscent of The Divine Comedy’s more tender moments. Everything down to the appropriately symbolic cover art is professionally done and more than worth its weight in gold.

Love’s Best Habit runs at a slow pace, and sometimes the loftiness of the lyrics can work against the listener’s attention. This seems a necessary evil considering the depth of substance in Shakespeare’s verses. It often takes a second, third, or tenth reading to catch the full meaning of a Shakespeare sonnet, and when put to song it is tempting to focus on the prettiness of the melody over the complexity of the words. That is to say, Love’s Best Habit warrants a second or third listen.

A lot more can be said about the successes and failures of interposing centuries-old poetry onto modern pop structures, but my simple assessment is that Withington clearly understands and reveres Shakespeare’s sonnets. He handles them with as much intimacy as he would his own words and makes the interposition feel like less of a stretch than one might expect. But I’ll leave that judgment up to you.

Love’s Best Habit is now for sale at the Tuck Shoppe, and I strongly recommend you purchase a copy in between classes.