LifeSize Delivers a Giant Size Collection

LifeSize, the moniker for singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Scott Marshall, has released an eponymous double album that compiles most of his recorded output in the decade of the 2010s. Marshall grew up in Seattle and spent his college years in the San Francisco Bay Area, becoming a part of the music scene through the band Noisy Neighbors. After some years of wandering, Marshall settled in Los Angeles, releasing LifeSize’s first album, Eden Next Left, in 2010. The next two albums, Dream Walking and Woolsey, followed in 2013 and 2020, respectively.

The 24-track LifeSize, which dropped in October, accounts for most of the previous three albums, leaving seven songs on the table. So if you don’t have a pretty good idea of LifeSize’s music by the end, you haven’t been listening. The first three songs, “The River Comes,” “Find Our Way,” and “California Home,” come from each of the albums in succession, and one doesn’t get the sense that a decade has just gone by. Marshall’s deep, whispery voice has changed little over the years, and his songs distill unerringly from the same dark creative source. Unless you knew that this was a compilation, you probably wouldn’t guess the time that separates the material.

But another big reason for the continuity is longtime LifeSize collaborator Dave Darling. The multi-instrumentalist and producer of Def Leppard, Brian Setzer, and Janiva Magness brought in a range of class-A musicians over the years, including guitarists Michael Kane, Jeff Turmes, James Bishop, and, not the least of whom, Darling’s own incisive lead guitar playing. Hammond organ giant Arlan Schierbaum, who has played with Joe Bonamassa and on Heaven and Earth’s early albums, is an important presence on LifeSize’s first two records, cushioning such gems as “Find Our Way” and “Gone Again” and adding a Moog’s vintage voice to “Waiting” and “Thin Air.”

LifeSize’s use of guest female vocalists is also striking. Three are found in this collection, each bringing a range and dynamic that contrasts nicely with Marshall’s. Magness makes an appearance, carrying lead vocal duties on the doo-wop tinged “Always.” Her powerful grit-edged voice takes hold of the song as if it’s her own. Elizabeth Wight (Love Grenades) brings her smooth, crystalline voice to the lead vocals on one of the album’s standout tracks, “Back of the Car,” and Zahava Bost shares vocals with Marshall on “Black Car,” “Buried Alive,” and “Waiting.”

Most of the songs here find Marshall on the outside of love looking in, not unlike Leonard Cohen, whose late-period voice Marshall seems to stylize his own after. “We all want some heaven/ But no one wants to die/ We all want the truth but we lie,” Marshall sings in “Tableau,” a Cohen-esque catch-22 if ever there was one. The use of female vocalists opens up Marshall’s mystique-laden material, adding dimension to his songs, varying the tonal palette, and rendering his troubled ruminations of love relationally (at one point, Bost even sings, “Late at night when I fall to sleep/ I hear your voice so deep”).

The contrasts Shierbaum, Magness, Wight, and Bost bring to the material are absent from Woolsey's songs, which feature only Marshall and Darling. Even so, the Tom Petty-influenced “Your Love is so Hard to Find” and “California Home” are the standouts from that era of LifeSize’s output.

If this compilation suffers from anything, it’s the length. Stretching almost to an hour and a half, one gets the feeling that some songs could have been struck from the collection without anyone missing them. The slow grinding cover of Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” probably falls into this category. The heavy tenor of most of the material doesn’t help. “California Home,” “Man of Tao,” and “Cobra and Mongoose” stand out as honest-to-goodness rockers, which leaves the other 21 songs to their terse, meditative selves.

That said, LifeSize is still a remarkable achievement, bringing together an admirable collection of songs that serve not only as an introduction to Marshall’s work but as a complete piece in and of itself. Marshall covers the length and breadth of love and loss, incorporating moments of deep isolation, carnal lust, and spiritual awakening. The opening song, “The River Comes,” acts as a kind of thesis statement for LifeSize’s body of work, using water imagery from the biblical Psalms to describe despair, renewal, and dependence. Finishing off the journey is “Constellations,” which closes LifeSize, as it closed the first album, drawing vast meaning from the intimate and unsolvable puzzle of love: “If I could connect/ The constellations of your skin/ I would find the secrets/ Of the Universe lying within.”

Reviewed by Christopher Raley