Returning to the modern music world, after a seven-year hiatus, Jory Nash released “The Light Still Shines On The Main” to an appreciative audience at Hugh’s Room in Toronto, November 1, 2025.
Formed and brewed in a cauldron of life altering experiences, including Jory’s personal decision to walk away from the music business in 2019, suspending a successful fifteen year career as an independent singer-songwriter, the album is not only a testament to Jory’s enduring artistic fervour, but more so, a bouquet of love to his wife, who underwent a serious challenge with cancer, and to his sister who passed away from it. In a delicate series of songs, crafted and written by a precise master songwriter’s hand, Nash reflects, at times heartbreakingly, on his family’s tumultuous journey over the past several years.
“Here’s my rule of thumb / It may be daft or dumb / Say goodbye only once or twice / Leave no trace of your sacrifice / “Come what may”: That’s my best advice,” Jory writes in the album’s title track. A song that offers a metaphor to the heart of what an artist must do with the life they are surrounded in – bear witness and create. Above all, this is a work dedicated to unwavering love, resilience, spirit and courage in the face of daunting, formidable forces.
Best listened to as a single work of art, the eleven songs on the album are more like little glimmering jewels collected into a beautiful treasure box, each singularly captivating and enticing, but summarily, together producing a lasting emotional testament, moving effortlessly through joy and sorrow, wonder and dismay.
Recorded by Chris Stringer and Darren McGill at Union Sound Company; produced by Jory Nash and Chris Stringer, these songs are mixed to tantalizing perfection, providing each song with a rich luster that songs of such tender feeling rightfully deserve. Most of the songs were recorded “off the floor” with a stellar cast of musicians who provided a backdrop to these lyrical stories, often selecting musical choices beyond what Nash had envisioned.
Alternating between fingerstyle guitar accompaniment, piano and full band orchestration, the tracks flow sequentially into a compelling portrait of a man’s steadfast love for his family and his promise to stand with them through all travails.
Opening with “Oh, Little One,” which sets the tone for the passage that unfolds, Jory underscores his return to writing, which he hadn’t done in any meaningful way since 2019 when he left the music due to his deepening concern on how to maintain a viable professional life with the industry changes to streaming which had all but obliterated the possibility of CD sales and the means to produce records. Somehow though, with his wife’s health improving, Jory felt the need to express in his chosen art the period they had all survived. Written to his young son, the lyrics ponder the meaning of new steps, in a new day. “Well, the fever it broke like a bone / And I figured that I was alone / But there you stood, my sentinel son / And you asked me if I was ok / If the demons had all flown away / You could not have known just where I had gone / But oh, little one / There is no more work to be done / Everything is laughter and sunlight / And we can just be kind.”
Just where Jory had gone, of course, is the tale he tells with the rest of the songs, each an exploration of what he has lived through inside and outside. With his signature vocals and stylish guitar, Nash writes each tune in a thoughtful approach, both in arrangement and melodically, making the songs flow unexpectantly and surprisingly, revealing their core theme. Perhaps best exemplified by juxtaposing the appearance of specific songs.
“Sign Me Up,” “Doxorubicin,” and “Bombs Away,” three tracks that follow each other in the middle of the record demonstrate the purposeful creativity utilized by Nash and his team to establish mood and nuanced elaboration of events that are deeply insightful of living life.
“Sign Me Up” is an astute composition that balances effortlessly the pains of loss and relief of survival. Celebrating his wife’s recovery from years of medical procedures was offset by the death of his oldest sister by cancer. Attempting to state his profound love for her, he forced himself to write and share this before her departure. Using a double minor chord progression, the song possesses a poignant, elegiac characteristic elaborated by Robbie Grunwald’s subtle and haunting Farfisa outro.
“After her red devil treatments,” a euphonism for the chemotherapy drug Doxorubicin, “she would tell me that she felt like she was dying, that she hurt everywhere. It would be days of all-consuming pain then days more of slow recovery,” writes Nash about his wife’s treatment. In a breathtaking song, written on piano, Nash takes the listener into the Dante-like hellscape that some seriously ill cancer patients must endure. At the epicentre of his family’s suffering and “The Light Still Shines On The Main,” Nash takes into the heart of the matter, leaving no doubt why this music needs to be heard.
“Bombs Away” uses a pop-sensibility to break the spell of the previous two tunes but it is no less lethal. “True love is medicine for real pain/ But the healing is slow, and the bruises remain / As rare as black alabaster / And as cruel as a natural disaster / So why would anybody do this again and again? / But if you ask me / What could I say but “bombs away?” / Bombs away.”
With its impeccable production, gorgeous cover art by Roberta Landreth, and masterful songs from a gifted artist, Jory Nash’s “The Light Still Shines On The Main” merits spending a week or two hanging out with and maybe adding to your record wall.
Photo Credit: Jen Squires
Douglas McLean fell in love with music at a very early age and has worked as a musician and songwriter since his early teens. He has a deep love for the written word and has spent his life in pursuit of language as a means to convey what Van Morrison once called “the inarticulate speech of the heart”. He lives deep in the Almaguin Highlands with his wife and their dog. Douglas is active in local radio, recording, producing and writing, in and around Huntsville, Ontario.
His website is:
http://www.douglasmcleanmusic.com
