This follow-up to his fabulous 2017 live album with the Danish Radio Big Band, One More for the Road, finds vocalist, songwriter and saxist Stigers in an introspective and world-weary mood – which seems pitch-perfect for these times.

From Nick Lowe's 2001 album The Convincer, Stigers provides a suitably hangdog take on ‘Lately I've Let Things Slide’, while profitably channelling an almost New Orleans feel on the Turner Layton/Henry Creamer classic. After You've Gone) recorded by everyone from Bessie Smith to Wynton Marsalis, and the album's sole standard. Penned by Stigers and Goldings and cast as an intimate piano-vocal duet, ‘A Lifetime Together’ possesses the simplicity and gracefulness of an Erik Satie waltz.

Another standout, the captivating ‘She Knows’ by singer-songwriter John Fullbright, has the same kind of hymnic quality found in early Tom Waits. The hard-hitting title track and the doom-laden tread of ‘Here We Go Again’ (based on the Goldings original ‘Roach’) both supply welcome grit. There's a second, similarly impressive, piano-vocal, ‘Learning to Let You Go’, plus a bonus track on digital formats, the Bill DeMain/Larry Goldings-penned ‘Shut-Ins’ (“No trouble in our bubble, with a population of two”) which offers a waggish coda to this fine album.