Music history wouldn’t be half of what it is without all of the great songs about the one that got away. You know the kind: Boy meets girl, boy makes a play for girl, boy gets shot down. Shane Murphy’s “Regular John” comes on like another one of those classic rejection numbers—but it has even more torque once you realize the resentful lonely heart in question might not have found the cojones to bust a move in the first place.
As funked-up Montreal rocker Murphy explains, the song’s narrator is “a man of low degree, filled with self-pity, pining for a woman who sees herself as ‘higher status.’ He realizes he has no chance with this imaginary beauty but is still full of delusion.”
Hence street-poetically bleak passages like “West End girls gonna twist your neck/ They gonna make you holler/ Shoot you down remote control/ Bet your bottom dollar,” which let’s just say would never be mistaken for excerpts from The Power of Positive Thinking. They provide a perfect layup, though, for the tune’s lamenting refrain of “I’m just a Regular John/ And I’m barely holdin’ on.” And while the song is busy depicting the power imbalance at its core, it even manages to work in namechecks to both Iceberg Slim and Connie Francis—a pairing we’re pretty confident has never happened before, anywhere and in any context.
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Feeling denied when you haven’t even tried your best is a dichotomy that’s perfectly in keeping with the theme of irony that runs through Murphy’s latest album, Easy Street. The very title of the record is a winking acknowledgment that real life is anything but easy; elsewhere, the idea that there’s always more going on than meets the eye suffuses tracks like “Going Back to Brownsburg” (a revisionist blues that posits sex and drugs as the cure for the main character’s ills) and “Lucky in Love” (a one-sided boast on the part of a self-styled Romeo who’s conspicuously glossing over all the times he didn’t score).
His seventh release since bursting on the scene with 2002’s The Green EP, Easy Street was recorded primarily at Toronto’s Lincoln County Social Club, in a first-ever collaboration between Murphy and producer Graham Playford. The record represents a new high-water mark in the artist’s ongoing campaign to weld gritty rock and blues to soul, funk and even reggae: His earthy vocals and percussive guitar on “Regular John” in particular harken back to the glory days of Sly Stone et al, when the line between “white” and “Black” music wasn’t so finely drawn and all that mattered was how hard you got down.
Skipping ahead just a few years, there’s a clear nod to Roger Troutman and Zapp in the voccoded backing vocals of keyboardist Kierscey Rand. And that’s not even mentioning the incredibly propulsive groove laid down by the one-man rhythm section of Anthony Lombardi on bass and drums.
Radio sure seems to be on board. Like the two previous singles from the album—“Painted Toes” and “Pay No Mind”—“Regular John” has hit the top 40 on Canada’s Active Rock chart, receiving regular play on CHOM FM in Montreal ever since its release on October 7. In the wake of that ongoing success, and to remind us all that he’s no mere studio phenomenon, Murphy has a couple of shows booked that promise to be unforgettable entries in his CV as a performer. His past appearances have included gigs with the highly diverse likes of Adele, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Allman Brothers, Buddy Guy, Steel Pulse and the Sam Roberts Band.
Unlike a certain John we could mention, expecting a “regular” time wouldn’t even begin to cover it.
