Cal Everett The Weight Of Early Promise 2026

This record apparently took ten years to record, and forty years to write. Boy, it better be good. And if you like a well-crafted piano-centric pop record, it's a darn fine one.

Older Now kicks things off in style, a piano-led pop rocker in the Billy Joel vein that builds into an expansive instrumental with a chorus of voices. Gimme Some Time features another chorus of layered vocals on top of a McCartney-esque melody. The rocking Teenager's Belief brings some nice hooks and another chorus of well-arranged vocals. The baroque-like Lover's Hollow Promise features piano and string quartet and has shades of the Left Banke. The Sloan-like Communication is the first guitar rocker and that's good, but it could use a hot lead break that's missing. Wake Up To The Nightmare rocks and features two different voices playing off each other to good effect.

The smart lyrical twists of Old Enough would be plenty, but they are laid on top of a melody that sounds like Paul McCartney and Brendon Benson woven together. Compromises is another solid pop tune with a fine lyric. The big production of I'll Never Go To Africa and brilliant vocal arrangement of Never Change My Mind show off Everett's skills in musical design and flourish. We finally get a guitar break on Help Is On The Way, a solid mid-tempo rocker. Then Epilogue ends the record with a big love song, a 30 second silent break, and then a bigger love song/come-together call for humanity. It's Big.

There's four I left off, and they are all good, just not as good as the rest. Summer Girls In Their Cars isn't the catchiest melody, and More To Love is saved by an interesting baroque string quartet. A couple near the end, Won't It, Wendy and Emily are just a bit too saccharine for my taste, like when Paul McCartney gets all twee. Along the way, there are six little less-than-one-minute interludes.

The artist suggests listening to the record as a whole, and I did that the first couple of times, and that works. But that takes an hour. Without the little interludes and maybe four of the songs, it would be a perfect 45 minute record, and that's a big deal. Perfect is a high bar. 

I hear echos of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Brendon Benson, ELO, Left Banke, Beach Boys and Sloan. Everett is a skilled songwriter, a talented multi-instrumentalist, and a fine singer. But his greatest skill seems to be in the arrangements. The instrumental flourishes and the multi-part vocals really stand out. It's worth going out of your way to hear it.