Matt Andersen’s The Hammer & The Rose is a veritable garden of heart. On hislatest record, the Canadian songwriter opts for the kind of thoughtful, tendersentiments and arrangements one might associate with flowers, trading in thehard steel edges of his heavy blues riffs for delicate compositions and a warmsweetness. The title track provides an elegant metaphor for the differences andpush-and-pull relationship between the head and the heart: the head wants toblaze a trail, prioritize practicality, and motor through things, while the heartwants to slow down, feel things, feel good. On The Hammer & The Rose, it’s theheart - the rose, the honey, the soul - that (mostly) wins out. But this is, of course,a Matt Andersen record. A surplus of heart is to be expected.

After seeing one of the shows with The Big Bottle of Joy band Andersen played on tour behind his 2023 album (Matt Andersen & The Big Bottle of Joy), producer and percussionist Joshua Van Tassel took him aside to express how much heloved the quieter moments of the set. Inspired by those times when the wildness settled down and he could hear, even clearer, the timbre and texture of Andersen’s voice, Van Tassel suggested cutting a record that maintained thatlow-key spirit. Andersen got to writing with that in mind, and it was the same chill vibe the team fostered for the sessions that would eventually go down in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where Christine Bougie (lap steel), Aaron Comeau (keys),Kyle Cunjak (acoustic bass), and Afie Jurvanen (acoustic guitar) gathered with Andersen to lay the tracks down live off-the-floor with Van Tassel behind both the boards and the drums.

The gently swinging title track opens the album and provides its thesis sentimentas Andersen laments the perpetual give-and-take between his stubborn head and soft heart. Roomier and more subdued arrangements allow his voice to take centre stage as he channels Don’t Give Up On Me-era Solomon Burke forsongs like the simmering ride-or-die ode “You’re Here to Stay,” the sorrowful tough luck number “Countin’ Quarters,” and the comforting “Hold On to Me,” a warm promise to be there for a friend. Expressions of gratitude arise elsewhereon the record, too. It comes through on romantic songs, in the domestic bliss of the hushed “Stay Home with You” and the soon-to-be first dance staple “Tonight Belongs to You,” a brief, moonlit history of Andersen’s relationship with hisgirlfriend. His take on the classic “Magnolia” does justice to J.J. Cale’s simple tribute to a transformative love.

While the record, sonically, is mostly rooted in roses, Andersen offers up a couple hammers, too - on the seething country number “Wayaheadaya,” he calls out negative and small-minded thinkers; and “The Cobbler (Good For My Sole)” cutsthe album neatly down the middle with its funkiest two minutes, a mostly instrumental interlude inspired by Andersen’s prompt to Van Tassel to send him a groove that Van Tassel’s late father would love.

But at the curtain call, it’s a return to gratitude - for the man who shaped Andersen, in the stirring closing track written for his aging dad. “No matter where we go now or what changes come,” he sings over acoustic guitar, “you will always be my father, and I’ll always be your son.” It’s sentiments like these that shape the blossoming core of the record. On The Hammer & The Rose, Matt Andersen tends to his garden - to his heart - and reminds us to do the same.

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