The gilded strumming that signals the start of Rod Stewart’s legendary “Maggie May” is left wholly intact in the version we find in Origins – Singers and Songs That Made Me from Jeff Coffey this September, but from the onset of the melody forward, there’s a tense pressure in the instrumentation that won’t find relief until Coffey starts to sing. Songs like this one, “Who Wants to Live Forever,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “New York Minute” don’t need a lot of additional elbow grease from players to sound like a millions bucks, but that doesn’t stop this studio vet from giving us an extra dash of panache in his third studio album – a record he has chosen to dedicate completely to cover material.
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Coffey has a romantic bend to his music, and in Origins, he’s making sure to give us everything he can emotionally dispense in the studio while staying out of the retro-modeled realm that so many of his closest peers have found themselves drowning in when attempting similar ventures. This is a unique record, and that’s not something that can be said of most cover albums by any means.
Early on in this tracklist, Coffey gets our hearts pumping with the bittersweet “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” and it isn’t until “Baby It’s Tonight” comes around that we hear him straddle a beat with as much precision as he does here. Performances of “When We Dance” and “Maybe I’m Amazed” couple conservative pop aesthetics with an obvious desire to be loud, proud and poetically vulnerable – a conflicting combo that nevertheless yields some of Origins’ most enticing moments. The bonus track here, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” doesn’t ask for us to wait until December to embrace its yuletide charisma, but instead washes us in the piano-sourced harmonies of a contemporary vocal crooner as though every day were a holiday. Coffey gets plenty of help from the one and only Michael Omartian in this LP, but while the support is evident in every one of these tracks, there’s always one star and one star alone in any given song on the album.
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“I Can’t Make You Love Me” is probably my favorite track here, but it’s hardly the lone example of this singer/songwriter revealing a good chunk of his soul in Origins. The moderate rockers “Magic Power” and “It’s Only Love” (the latter of which has Coffey harmonizing with a fierce Payton Taylor) have more emotion than I initially knew what to do with, while “Ask the Lonely” pounces as hard as it did when Journey first played it. I’ve heard a lot of artists cover “This Is It” in bars and the booth over the last decade alone, but few have competed with as big and brash a groove as this cat does in his version, and honestly, the same can be said for “Back on My Feet Again.”
All in all, Jeff Coffey makes it pretty hard to step away from his latest album unimpressed, and that’s really something for a cover record debuting in 2020.
Jodi Marxbury