Send "Grant" Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Grant-Lee Phillips’ long career to date has been bookended by brilliance. Fuzzy, his debut album with Grant-Lee Buffalo, was one of the rock landmarks of the early ‘90s. Fourteen years and a string of solo records later, his sublime 2006 cover album Nineteeneighties paid tribute to classic acts from New Order to Pixies, proving Phillips was an artist with a musical voice so singular he could take on almost anything and make it his own. Yet Phillips’ emotive, widescreen songwriting has always walked a thin line, at times becoming overblown and occasionally lapsing into stodgy blue-collar rock. Sadly, while Little Moon offers glimpses of GLP at his best, more often than not it gives this side free reign. The upbeat stomper “Good Morning Happiness” starts the show with a banality and leadenness that will likely leave you cold. The air-punching MOR of “Strangest Thing” could be late Springsteen, with some of the soft-focus upholstery of a David Gray track. Its reliance on clichéd lines like “You gotta believe in something” certainly do it no favours. The title track is much more likeable, as Phillips returns to the multi-layered, filigree realm he’s made his own. There’s a swooning, salon-like air to the song, with its languid piano, brushed percussion, intricate picking, and lilting strings, and while not exactly a work of searing originality, it’s beautifully performed and produced....full text |
| Americansongwriter |
| Along with the dwindling wolf population and the melting polar ice cap, the lack of attention paid to the music of Grant-Lee Phillips is turning into a national scandal. With the latest, his strongest album ever, perhaps Phillips will finally get the acute attention he deserves. And we can go back to working on the wolf thing. Grant-Lee begins this fizzy pop record with, “Good Morning Happiness,” a strummy march, which links a bubblegum melody, to a guitar solo right out of Ziggy-era Bowie. “Gonna get up with the birds,” Phillips sings in his just-awakened yawn of a voice. The title tune is even lovelier. Over gentle finger-picking, Phillips croons a lullaby to his child: “Heaven knows the future is ours/Way up in the stars.” Delicate strings complete this gem. The ragtime feel of “The Sun Shine On Jupiter,” with its mission band and trippy synths ends the record on an upbeat but eerie note; the man’s stock-in-trade. Since his earliest days, this singular songwriter has turned out countless pieces of elegant pop. Why not pay him heed? Just like the wolf and the icecap, Phillips is a national treasure. And needs, every bit as much, to be preserved....full text |
| Itunes |
| Recorded in just four days with a small core of session musicians, with the bulk of the instruments and vocals cut live, Little Moon motors along with a free swinging energy and a natural polish that only seasoned professionals can accomplish without a retouch. ”Seal It With a Kiss” has a soulful groove that matches Phillips’ sophisticated croon. He’s no longer the loud and volatile alt-rocker of his youth, but rather a skilled songwriter with a love for classic forms. Dixieland horns flesh out “It Ain’t the Same Old Cold War Harry,” strings underline “Blind Tom,” while a piano gently steadies the haunting ballads, “Nightbirds” and his welcome home to his baby girl, “Violet.” Fatherhood has made Phillips a happy man. From the opening swing of the un-ironic “Good Morning Happiness,” he walks and sings with an extra skip in his step. “Oh baby, don’t you know we’ve all got hidden treasure?” he sings at the beginning of the upbeat “Buried Treasure.” Even the slow piano creep of “Older Now” immerses itself in the richness of life experience....full text |
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