Pop star in waiting piano man Frank Schiazza sent me some nearly finished masters off his darkly beautiful upcoming album Solitaire and though I usually don’t review music you can’t purchase, here is an exception because you can pre buy the album here and push forward its release date.
Frank’s website says this about him: “a Brooklyn-born songwriter/singer/musician who’s been in chase of his muse for the better part of two decades. Although eclectic in the music he creates, Frank is most at home performing roots music: the sort of blues/folk/soul/country/rock hybrid that used to the rule the airwaves of yesteryear.” rock nyc has written about Frank several times, especially loving his 2011 album Following Through but even by those standards Solitaire, a solo piano album with deeply gorgeous melodies and Adult Oriented early 70s arrangements of quintessential tales of heartbreak, is something special.It is blue the way In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning is blue, in the way Blue Moves is blue; the songs are faux-classical piano ballads with just voice and piano burrowing forward.
There are moments that would be amazing with a full band, the self-help “Take What You Can”, a rethinking and extending of “Vienna”, with Frank’s ready for radio vocals and completely sticky chorus, deserves strings maybe horns; “Movie Moment” whose opening notes are so simple and lovely you’d think they were there forever and maybe they have been. At the heart of the partial album I’ve heard is “Soul Changing Love”, the best lyric, has some of Carole King’s Rhymes and Reasons in its DNA, a dark mauve dream of romance.
Though we are used to Frank the blues soul man he only appears once here, pounding the piano with the blues screamer “Doomsday Baby” And the two final songs on the tracks I’ve heard “Wars And Warriors” and “When You Leave Me In The Dust” are darker still, the former sounds like an outtake from Hearts And Bones and the latter uses the highest register of his voice to complain to a loved one.
These are very strong songs and I can’t wait for him to release them in final form so hurry up and prebuy it.
