Max Broady, once a callow youth and now a callow man. How the years have changed him. Presented in chronological order this chronology begins by showing us Max as a young man optimistically declaring “Souls are Stars” to anyone with the ears to listen. If you sniff very, very hard you can almost smell the slightest waft of incense.

Quickly, under Adam John Miller’s tutelage, Max began to grow as a songwriter, in leaps, and dare I say it, bounds. Hit after hit poured from his fast callousing fingers. We can still hear the sense of fun and his joie de vivre, his lust for life, in such songs as “My Private Joke” – it is a joke after all! But – listen – what’s this? A new sense of introspection, as this joke is looking inwards, revealing, yes, his soul, as it this joke is private, and all of his own.

But it wasn’t all looking in; Mid Period Broady (MPB) saw Max gazing out at the world, and imagining – nay seeing – another one; this aptly demonstrated on such classics as “Another World We Know”. Also MPB shows us a new side to Broady; the one with wandering feet; the one who’s married to the road; the one who’s taking on all comers with an itchy trigger finger.

Which brings us around to Broady’s latest, most stylistically mature efforts: These beautiful, wistful songs see a man approaching old age, time as it ravages, and all the harsh beauty this entails. It isn’t a cakewalk, but as he sings on War Of The Roses, “[he’s] changed his rose, white for red”.

And as with his peers, the final song on this diligent, thoughtful and timely compilation shows that with decrepitude comes a wistfulness. A false nostalgia then, in Goal Scoring Superstar Hero, as Max remembers his youth, not as a goal scoring superstar hero, but as a troubadour, a singer, reflecting our times as a mirror to the soul, unblinking showing life in its dizzying highs and its terrifying lows. And, if that’s not what being a goal scoring superstar hero is, I don’t know what is.

John Perry, July 2011