Folk Roots, Surrey, England
If you like, you can call on Franke for a hefty dose of reality therapy. Here's a bod whose main mission in life seems to be to inflict willful damage on the plastic bubbles we all surround ourselves with, rooting out reasons, and pointing to a possible purpose in it all.
Having frightened you with that little mouthful, let me rush to say that these eleven songs are as classy and poetic as most anything around. He's reprised his superb Thanksgiving Eve, and in classic troubadour fashion has crafted a whole cluster of gems which shine with equal sparkle. Bob's style is to work his unassuming delivery, and gentle, emotional tunes into some of the most insightful, dry-wit, lyrics on the scene. The result is a standard of songs that most writers can only dream about, and admire in drop-jawed silence, e.g. his song based on the children's classic tale of The Velveteen Rabbit extends the basic emotions created by the story out into a lovely, moving experience of the power of song. Clever, clever, clever!
Bob's a true artist, and he'll dig things out of your heart you didn't know were still there. Curiosity aroused? I hope so.
The Washington Post
"There are words that change the way you look at things," sings Bob Franke in "A Healing In This Night", which gives his collection of songs its title. "There are sounds that silence idle talk/And there are songs that circle in your mind/And seek your heart, and find it/'And seize it like a hawk." Those are just the sort of songs that gentle-voiced Franke offers in this subtly absorbing collection. It opens with a vivid Gothic blues called "Catfish", served up with the metallic tang of Franke's National steel guitar, and moves through 10 changes of mood, from "A Velveteen Love Song", a tender distillation of the classic children's tale "The Velveteen Rabbit", through "Predictions", an achingly slow-building heartbreaker about enduring friendships challenged by the AIDS epidemic, to perhaps the computer blues, "I'm A Mainframe, Baby".