Stop for a minute. Conjure up whatever images you can of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. Now imagine that it is springtime, just like it is here, and a dapper gentleman, humbly observant and overwhelmed by the comings and goings of love, is out for a stroll, just like you might like to be. Slide in San Diego-based musician, songwriter and producer Gregory Page’s newest album, Love Made Me Drunk, and you’re almost there.
Birthed from a brief, but passionate affair between traveling musicians, Page first met Paris when he first met his father seven years ago. Three visits and a couple accordions later he’s delivered the senses and sounds of the city across the Atlantic with exceptional eloquence.
Delicate percussion, plodding baselines and poignant harmonies — the violins so sorrowful at times that you can feel them resonating with your heart strings — combined with Page’s versatile voice — a jazzy, folky laze and scratch to it — make the musicality on this one hard to beat. And somehow, as the coffee-soaked, stress-filled, ever-rushing, never-sleeping weeks roll by, these slow, romantic, French-style arrangements translate perfectly in the quick minds of many a left-brained college student. Maybe it’s because after a long night of love-driven drinking, Page tragicomically compares cough syrup to a “fancy liqueur,” or because he, though 43, is still single, still searching, just like most of us, or just because the songs are so damn beautiful. In any case, this album is a welcome cue to settle back, relax and sip on something that slows the pace once in a while — and I don’t mean cozy up with a bottle of high quality dextromethorphan; sip on love.
You needn’t go to Paris to learn to appreciate the finer things. Gregory Page has done it for you.
Gregory Page will perform at Dizzy’s on May 20.