B-Side Guys

“Wrapped in the wool / thinking of your un-lived lives.” That opening couplet does something quietly strange: it situates the narrator in comfort while orienting his attention toward absence, the lives that didn’t happen, the paths that weren’t taken. From there, “no inner light” spends the rest of its runtime trying to find a way out of the room.

Parker’s first album in seven years, Hand Reaching Through Flames, has the intimacy of a small performance space and something else underneath, the uncanny quality of a transmission picked up from far away. Producer Sam Carlson renders the acoustic guitar, bass, Mellotron, and percussion in what the album’s notes describe as chiaroscuro, and that’s exactly right. Each element is lit from one side while the other falls into shadow.

The lyric moves through threshold imagery with the consistency of someone who’s been living with the metaphor long enough that it stopped being a metaphor. Windows, mirrors, eyes: “into the mirror / take me out of the reach of light” arrives twice, and the repetition clarifies that this isn’t a request for darkness but for passage. The mirror is an exit, not a reflection. “I’ll do what you want if you let me drive / this getaway line” is the song’s most exposed moment, the negotiation at the center of what might otherwise read as atmospheric drift.

The title names an absence rather than a presence, which is its own kind of precision. Whatever inner light the song reaches toward, Parker doesn’t claim to have found it. The reaching is the point.