Richard Swift
4 Hits & a Miss: The Essential Richard Swift
SECRETLY CANADIAN
Forever under-appreciated and underestimated in his lifetime, early death has brought a lustrous patina and confident swagger to Richard Swift’s memory and the diversity of his writing, production, and vocal talents. If he wasn’t working as part of The Shins, as collaborator to Dan Auerbach and Kevin Morby, or producer to Lætitia Sadier (among many others), the home-recording genius and songwriter leapt through self-devised, warmly lo-fi-toned takes on funky folk, green-eyed soul, blue-balled garage psych, easygoing cabaret jazz, and spindly indie pop. To Swift, a single combustible song was but another opportunity to make an atomic explosion from the tiniest firecracker.
Though the 360 degrees of Swift’s career warrants several box sets and expanded original albums (his ambient Instruments of Science and Technology project from the late 2000s alone begs for detailed dissertation), Secret Canadian’s one-disc wonder 4 Hits & a Miss is a solid overview of his art and commerce. From the tipsy Tin Pan Alleyism of “The Novelist” to the rustic R&B harmonic folk of “Would You?”; from the open-face funk of “Lady Luck” to the reverberating Spector-esque “Whitman”; from the hillbilly psych of “Dirty Jim” to the cinematic score-without-a-film “Walking Without Effort Theme”—Swift exerts more sweat, energy, elegance, and mixed-and-matched innovation in one hour than most artists do across their entire careers.
