(4 / 5)
“Only Love”, the new record from Black Country singer-songwriter Dan Whitehouse, is built around just piano and voice, recorded live with jazz pianist David O’Brien. It has that particular kind of honesty that comes when you strip everything back to a voice and a piano, and that is exactly what Dan Whitehouse has done here.
These songs are the sound of a father writing to and about his son across a very long distance; England on one side, Japan on the other. It never hides behind arrangement or effects. What you hear is what was in the room.
This isn’t new ground for Dan Whitehouse. He first touched on this feeling on “The Glass Age” in 2022, a record shaped by the experience of being separated from his son in Japan and finding ways to stay connected through screens.
He returned to the songs in a much more stripped-back form the following year with “Reflections On The Glass Age”. So by the time you reach “Only Love”, you are not catching him mid-thought. You’re catching him years into a conversation with himself that he clearly isn’t finished having. That is what gives the record its depth.
“Bird of Paradise” opens the album quietly, almost held-breath quiet. It sits comfortably with the rest of the record, where so much of the emotion comes from what is left unsaid. The title track, “Only Love”, sets the tone. It is about fatherhood stretched across continents, and about how love finds a way to travel even when you can’t.
From there the record moves gently through different shades of the same feeling. Some of that comes from the way his life is actually shaped. Every year he flies out to spend 90 days with his son, arriving in mid-December in time for Christmas and staying until mid-March, just long enough to celebrate his son’s birthday. Then comes the goodbye.
“Wild Goose” is a change of voice, written by Freya Jonas rather than Whitehouse, but it fits comfortably into the album’s intimate piano-and-vocal setting.”A Thousand Lives” takes the record in a slightly different direction, still circling around ideas of love, distance and time.
“Mina Glass” is the odd one out, in the best way, with no words at all. It is written in and named after Minatomirai, the high-rise district by Tokyo Bay where his son lives. Without a lyric to lean on, the instrumental becomes one of the record’s most direct pieces of homesickness. “Spaces” brings the idea of distance back into words. Written by Katie Whitehouse (no relation) – Dan’s long-time manager/agent – it adds another voice to the album while staying within the same sparse piano-and-vocal setting.
“Every Brick” carries some real grief in it, but there is a steadiness underneath that keeps it from tipping into sadness. The song imagines love as something built like a house, out of months and years of trips, days out, video calls, football matches and shared meals. There is something very ordinary about those details, which is probably why the song works so well. The distance is huge, but the relationship is built from small things. The closing cut “Are You There?” leaves us with a simple question that seems to sum up much of the album.
These are songs written out of the hard parts of long-distance parenting, but Dan Whitehouse keeps turning them back towards connection: the small rituals, the journeys and the moments of joy that make the distance worth it. David O’Brien’s piano playing helps that enormously. It is loose and responsive, more like a conversation than an accompaniment, which fits an album that is really about staying close to people who are far away.
Dan Whitehouse has spent the last couple of decades quietly building a reputation as a kind of documentary songwriter, turning real lives, his own and other people’s, into song. Born and raised in Wolverhampton, he began his recording and touring career as a teenager with Midlands’ singer-songwriter, and bandleader Naomi, before fronting the rock band Sonara, including an appearance at Reading Festival in 2003. He went solo in 2007, releasing two self-funded records before signing to independent label Reveal Records, where he released three albums.
His more recent work has taken him into projects such as “The Glass Age”, which explored the way technology has changed how we communicate and connect, and “Voices From The Cones”. These days he divides his time between the UK and Japan, and that back-and-forth, the distance, the missing and the returning, sits right at the heart of “Only Love”.
“Only Love” may be one of Dan Whitehouse’s most exposed and direct records yet. There is nowhere to hide in a piano-and-vocal album. It is a quiet, clear-eyed record, carried by two talented musicians and a collection of songs that don’t need much else. It is a warm, honest listen, the kind of record you could put on at the end of a long day and just let sit with you.
By Manja Williams
Photo by Pete Millson
(1 / 5) ‘Dull Zone’
(2 / 5) ‘OK Zone’
(3 / 5) ‘Decent Zone’
(4 / 5) ‘Super Zone’
(5 / 5) ‘Awesome Zone’
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