Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”

‘Tis the season for albums of loss and change. As summer’s lost leaves litter the sidewalk and disintegrate beneath our booted feet, the heavy grey sky rests its mournful weight on our shoulders. For me, there’s a feeling of hunkering down, of settling in — of preparing myself for the long survival march that is winter.

It feels appropriate, then, that veteran Canadian alt-country band Cuff The Duke chose this time of year for the release of their fifth album, Morning Comes, a ten-song meditation on mourning and moving on. “[This album is] about dealing with the loss of someone and the change that brings to one’s life,” lead singer Wayne Petti says. “The confusion and loneliness that occurs at that point in someone’s life. Coming to grips with the reality of those things.”

This is no wallow. The album’s tone ranges from meditative and thoughtful in closer “Letting Go” to positively upbeat on the rolling, if not quite rollicking, “Standing On The Edge.” Even the mood-swinging frustration/sorrow epic “Bound To Your Own Vices” opens with a kicky country beat.

But hiding beneath are lyrics that make the autumn release timing seem quite deliberate. Petti - he and I seem to have something in common - sings of the weather like an oppressor. “You are carried through the summer months with ease / When the water starts to freeze and contract like a fist / The loneliness of pressure soon concedes,” reads lead single “Count On Me.” In Brightest Part of the Sun: “Come, lay next to me / Under daylight and fallen leaves / Hardships coming on the wind / They carry our hopes with them.”

Cuff The Duke has announced that this is the first half of a double-album set, the second due in exactly a year. That album, they explain, will be the high to this album’s low, about “embracing what has happened and navigating down new roads.” But as enticing as that promised joyousness sounds, casting Morning Comes as dwelling solely on such sights colder disregards its appealing complexity. Even the title hints at hope, at the inevitability of a new day. In the months when it seems that twilight never leaves, the promise of a dawn is something we all cling to.

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Morning Comes is available now.
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