Album Review: Jason Schoellen – Ballads For My Bride

As gifts to a loved one go, Ballads For My Bride by Jason Schoellen is probably one of the best-conceived and best-executed ones you’re likely to hear this year.

For Schoellen, the album is a tribute to his wife Christina, as he sings of his love for her over ten songs and three additional edits, a testament to how his life has changed for the better since falling in love – and judging by the lyrics, that love has gotten deeper as the years have passed.

He has described Ballads For My Bride as “a labor of love, but it was definitely more love than labor,” and that is something that really comes through not just in the passion of the vocals on each track, but also in the way it documents how love can mend your heart, help it grow.

And just like love grows, so did what became Ballads For My Bride – from a single song conceived while Christina was away, it expanded to an EP and then a full album as Schoellen came to realise the full scale of the effect a loved one can have on your life.

Broke Me For The Better sings of escaping your own ego, and of coming to terms with loving yourself as much as someone else loves you, and is followed by Not Just Because, which highlights the small things in a relationship that keep it strong, finding beauty in ordinary things because of the person that shares them with you.

Just as love is eternal, so are some of the influences on the album: country rock plays a large role in the arrangements and melodies, but the album equally draws in from 80s-infused power ballads and AOR, a combination that heightens the emotional impact of the lyrics. That mix is especially apparent on the moving, majestic You Have No Idea.

Though Ballads For My Bride may be the story of one man – and the love he holds for his wife – Schoellen translates that very personal experience into themes and images in the lyrics that just about all of us will be able to identify with. On The Luckiest Man, he sings how labelling himself that may be a cliché but that it’s true, and its upbeat celebration of love is a summery, sparkling highlight of the album.

And it’s a sentiment that is easy to relate to: we may all have similar feelings and express them in similar ways, but each love is unique, each bond is special, and Schoellen excels in taking his own love and putting it out there for others to be part of. That is one heck of an expression of love, one that few of us will ever get to experience; here we get to share how it has impacted one man and his life.

Ballads For My Bride was released on the 7th of April and can be streamed on Spotify, YouTube Music, and Tidal – for other listening options and background info on the album, check out Jason Schoellen on Facebook.