The conceit could so easily tip into sentimentality of the cloying, greeting-card variety. It does not. Spottiswoode is constitutionally incapable of saccharine. He is too much the wit, too much the bruiser, too much the poet who knows that the most honest compliment lands sideways rather than head-on. The title alone — *It Wasn't In The Script* — tells you everything: here is a man who spent decades writing other people's stories and suddenly found the most important one ambushing him from the inside.

Produced by Peter Fox at Brooklyn Pearl with a stripped-down electric quartet — Brian Geltner on drums, Drew Hart on bass, Kenny White on keyboards, Spott himself on Fender Strat — the record trades the baroque arrangements of his septet years for something rawer and more immediate. The decision pays off handsomely. The title track is retro R&B with its collar loosened, the kind of thing that could have slipped off a Muscle Shoals session tape circa 1967 had someone forgotten to remove the irony. *Just As We Planned* hits like guitar rock that means business. *The Bullet's Coming* and *Worrier* occupy a lounge-noir twilight where Chet Baker and Tom Waits might share a stool and argue about the bill.

Then there is *Summer Day*, a piece of gospel music so genuinely joyful it makes you feel faintly guilty for having ever doubted the genre. *You Think Too Much* is philosophical boogie-woogie — a phrase that should be an oxymoron and somehow isn't. The softer songs — *When I'm With You*, *Old Man At The Station*, *Through The Shadows* — carry the real emotional weight, love songs that are not quite love songs, or rather are a kind of love nobody writes love songs about, protective and helpless and completely smitten.

Martha Redbone joins on two tracks and does precisely what the press release promises: she takes the roof off. But the album's most quietly extraordinary choice is this: Spottiswoode's daughter Sophie Lee sings backing vocals on more than half the record. Her presence is not a gimmick. It is the entire sonic argument. A child's voice does something to music that no amount of production can manufacture — it introduces fragility, time, the knowledge that nothing stays. Every time Sophie Lee appears on these tracks, the stakes rise.

Comparisons will be made — The Kinks, Leonard Cohen, Lucinda Williams, Ray Charles — and they are not wrong, exactly, but they are not the point. Spottiswoode sounds like nobody but Spottiswoode: mordant, tender, funny, occasionally furious, always searching for the precise word when the approximate one would do perfectly well and simply isn't good enough.

Fatherhood has undone better artists than this. It has softened them, made them careful, drained the blood from their work in the name of propriety. Spottiswoode has gone the other way entirely. This is his most dangerous record because it is his most honest. He has handed over the keys to someone who cannot even drive yet, and the album is all the better for it.

Don't wait for the world to catch up. It rarely does with the good ones. Which is precisely why you should be upstairs at The Green Note in Camden this Friday, May 22nd, for the London release show — an intimate room, a singular artist, and twelve songs that deserve to be heard at close range. Tickets via wegottickets.com. No excuses accepted.