Pete Kosanovich - Beauty Within You (2025)

Prolific song writer and multi instrumentalist Pete Kosanovich releases his eleventh album, including three with his band The Pale Blue Eyes, and two live ones.

This one is called Beauty Within You, and the cover features Pete sat outside the Troubadour in Chelsea, looking like the psychedelic dandy he always does. No doubt thinking of all the artists who have appeared there in past, who have helped shape his own career. Its interesting to trace Pete’s musical history from The Pale Blue Eyes, who as you can imagine were a punky grungy psychedelicy garage band, through the start of his solo career when he started incorporating earthy blues and roots and americana music through to where is now, which is almost full on traditional English folk music.

There are also touches of Americana too, in fact the opening song could fool you into thinking you had put on a Townes Van Zandt album, with the finger picking guitar and bass opening. Pete plays both these instruments, indeed he plays all the instruments on the album, and well as producing and writing the songs, which is a great achievement, but is it a hat too many.

It is a very personal album, with songs about his mother, Fade Away, and his son, In My Life, both of whom he obviously loves dearly, so much that his last albums cover features a drawing by his. son, a wonderful childlike vision of a guitar. There are also western vistas of outlaws guns and penitentiaries with Three O’Clock In The Morning and When I See An Outlaw, which also touches on his anti war stance, having escaped the Yugoslav War in the 90’s, as a Serbian child. Mirror Mirror tackles men struggling in today’s modern world, and is a favourite of mine along with When I See An Outlaw.

Pete likes to inhabit the baroque world of The Stones Play With Fire or Lady Jane, or Leonard Cohens Bird On A Wire and he does this successfully on this album of fifteen tracks.

A great songwriter he is no doubt, a great instrumentalist he is no doubt, but I think a little collaboration with other musicians would not go amiss, and would add an extra splash of colour to his palette. Although his legion of fans might well disagree with me.

Having said that, this is a deserving body of work, from an ever evolving artist.