Scott Seskind - Chance

Scott Seskind
Chance
Ebalunga!!!
USA/Austria, 1991/2025
LP

I can’t remember the last records that helped me slow down as much as these, or that so warmly integrated different aspects of my taste across time, helping me recover a bit of something lost along the way, a nostalgia I can bear.

Like many people, I was completely disarmed by the first Scott Seskind song I heard—“I Remember,” an easy highlight on the timeless Sky Girl compilation. A tender recounting of a teenage male friendship by a speaker turned reflective due to the impending death of his friend’s mom, it’s delivered in a gently smiling monologue with a backing voice echoing and loosely melodicizng key lines behind a lazy strummed guitar. I vaguely assumed it was from the ‘70s, and felt certain it was a one-off. How could there be more?

I didn’t know it until I found Scott Seskind’s name in my inbox, but there’s more. Thanks to Austria’s Ebalunga!!! label, both the album that “I Remember” first appeared on and its predecessor are back in print. Thank God there are people who thought to look for more.

Chance puts “I Remember” in its context and extends its charm. First released in 1991 on cassette only, and recorded on the same humble Tascam four-track tape recorder as Seskind’s cult-classic downer-folk debut from 1985 (he has a cult-classic downer-folk debut from 1985!), the album betrays its era slightly in the percussive strumming of the opener “I Hang On To You,” but otherwise it has the same out-of-time quality as the tune that brought me here.

That candor I was so drawn to is another through-line. In songs like the union anthem “P 9 Proud” and the shrugging idol relinquishment lament “I Saw Bob Dylan,” Seskind writes with a winning literality that my partner described as “Sun Kil Moon meets Sesame Street.” Perhaps that’s slightly overstating both sides of the equation, but it’s a charming assessment that befits music this persistently human and sincere.

This first-time vinyl edition adds a bonus track that didn’t appear on the tape, fittingly titled “Last Song.” The tune ends abruptly when Suskind’s wife calls him to dinner and, after a quick staccato strum, you can hear him say, “Huh? Okay.”

So that’s it. There’s more, but there won’t be more forever. And who’d have guessed we’d get all this?