ANT MCNAUGHT

Apache Lane

antmcnaught.com

After a stint in the New York folk scene, this singer-songwriter moved to Santa Cruz in 1980 and started a family. He never stopped playing—it just took him a few decades to get his stuff on tape. Better late than never. This set reveals McNaught to be a deep-thinking, dusky-voiced strummer with some lingering questions to work out about love and mortality. The delicate country shuffle “Cottonwood Tree” is about fathers and sons making sense of one another, while the Springsteen-ish sax-and-keys rocker “Fool for Love” is about men and women failing to do likewise. McNaught could have written about the same things 30 years ago. Now, perhaps, he understands them a little better.