| Americana, Folk-Blues |
‘Sir’ Oliver Mally & Peter Schneider, Songs For A Rainy Day: An Album That Turns Grey Skies Into Gold
There’s a particular alchemy at work on Songs For A Rainy Day, the new album from “Sir” Oliver Mally and his longtime guitar partner Peter Schneider: doubt turning into hope, hard luck turning into something almost like grace. Across ten songs, the two of them let a wounded, uncertain mood build up and then gradually break away, the way clouds do after a long downpour. There are lonesome men staring out of windows, women who refuse to belong to anyone, rivers running black with coal, and the particular ache of turning sixty and wondering if you can still live up to your own ideals. By the time the last note fades, what started as an album about harsh weather has become one about weathering things, and it’s quite simply one of the most beautiful and honest acoustic records of the decade, an absolute must for anyone who loves music that comes straight from the heart.
Oliver Mally has spent decades earning his reputation as one of Austria’s finest blues musicians, a self-taught guitarist since the age of fifteen, weaned on Albert King, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Albert Collins, and the founder of the “Sir” Oliver Mally’s Blues Distillery back in 1990. But somewhere along the way, his singer-songwriter side, the side that reveres Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt as much as any bluesman, began to take over. Since his acclaimed 2010 album Ol’ Dogs, Nu Yard (triumphantly reissued on vinyl in 2025), Oliver has repeatedly wandered off into the wider Americana landscape of the storyteller, and on Songs For A Rainy Day, he and Schneider dedicate that passion to an entire album, another full collaboration after Folksblues Adventures and the 2024’s Almost There – Blues & Songs.
And it’s difficult to imagine anybody doing anything better than what they’ve done with this album. Where Almost There found Mally the bluesman charming his way through a smoky, cotton-field kind of blues, Songs For A Rainy Day finds Mally the storyteller: a mature songwriter who, over the years, has grown into a name which sits comfortably alongside his own heroes. His voice remains the extraordinary instrument it always was, soft, caressing and tender one moment, then suddenly powerful and utterly captivating the next, always spellbinding, always luminous. It’s a voice he’s also lent to the stage as an actor, and you can hear that dramatic instinct at work in every one of these songs: Oliver Mally doesn’t just sing his stories, he inhabits them.
None of this would land with quite the same force without Peter Schneider at his side. Schneider’s guitar work, spread across guitars, dobro, baritone guitar and lap steel, is the quiet architecture holding these songs up: discreet, intense and luminous, never once trying to outshine the songs themselves, always weaving around Oliver’s voice the way light rain traces the outline of a windowpane. Their chemistry, honed over previous albums and countless shared concerts, has reached the point where the two of them seem to finish each other’s musical sentences. The record’s biggest treat is the presence of special guest Roberto Luti, whose slide guitar appears on three tracks and adds an extra layer of shimmer and ache exactly where it’s needed. Remarkably, the whole album was recorded in a single session, and almost every track heard here is a first take, a testament to just how instinctively these musicians understand one another.
The album opens with “Somewhere Along The Line,” a song Mally has said helped him make sense of a blurry, disorienting stretch of time in his life, and Schneider’s guitar work here is razor-sharp, landing exactly where it needs to. “Hard Luck City” follows with Mally’s own wry, weary take on today’s exhausting Zeitgeist, carried by one of Schneider’s most haunting and delicately unspooling guitar phrases on the record. “Black River,” the very first song written for the album, is a genuine highlight: Peter Schneider and Roberto Luti navigate the tune with the effortless mastery of true craftsmen, somehow coaxing an uplifting mood out of a song whose title promises anything but.
Then comes the first of three carefully chosen Bob Dylan covers, “She Belongs To Me”, the moment the album’s mood first properly brightens. Oliver sings it with the wide-eyed wonder and respect of a man discovering, verse by verse, the self-possession of a woman who belongs to no one but herself. “Butterfly Girl” is one of Mally’s earliest acoustic compositions, a song his mother loved dearly, and by his own admission this new version, a small marvel of interlocking, “guitar-tetris” picking, is his favourite recording of it yet. “Mr. President” lets off some steam in the best tradition of the talking blues, Mally’s sly, exasperated address to power delivered with evident relish.
Track seven brings the album’s emotional peak: “Blind Willie McTell”, the first song the pair recorded for this record, cut in a single take with Roberto Luti’s slide guitar spiralling underneath. It’s a spellbinding tour through Dylan’s Deep South, and Mally inhabits it fully. You can practically feel the dust from the road and hear the cicadas humming behind him. “Are You Happy Now” and “(Everything Is) Goin’ South”, the latter built around a riff Mally says simply fell out of a banjo Schneider gave him as a gift, keep the album’s restless, questioning energy alive, before everything settles into the closer, “Forever Young”. Recorded the year Mally turned sixty, his reading of Dylan’s classic strips away all the anthemic swagger the song usually gets saddled with and replaces it with something far more moving: a genuinely searching, slightly doubting meditation on whether he can keep living up to his own standards. It’s one of the most quietly devastating versions of this song you’re likely to hear.
Critics have already been quick to embrace this record. German music journalist and author Thomas Waldherr has praised it as an intelligent, beautifully crafted album that isn’t afraid to ask questions of itself, calling it an immediate and organic extension of the trio’s already deep musical understanding, and rightly noting that these songs are far too good to be saved only for rainy days. He is absolutely right! Songs For A Rainy Day earns its title not because it needs bad weather to work, but because it captures, better than almost any record this year, that particular alchemy by which sadness, doubt and hard luck slowly turn into something like hope, a light of incandescent beauty. Oliver Mally and Peter Schneider don’t cling to Dylan’s originals on the covers either, they reinterpret them as fully as they inhabit their own material, letting each song live an independent life of its own. A MUST. Whatever the weather, put this one on.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 27th, 2026
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Tracklisting:
1. Somewhere Along The Line
2. Hard Luck City
3. Black River
4. She Belongs To Me (*)
5. Butterfly Girl
6. Mr President
7. Blind Willie Mctell (*)
8. Are You Happy Now
9. (Everything Is) Goin South
10. Forever Young (*)
All songs written by Mally / Mally-Schneider except (*) 4, 7 and 10 written by Bob Dylan.
Recorded November 12/13, 2025
Musicians:
Oliver Mally: guitars, vocals, banjo, bass, harp (4)
Peter Schneider: guitars, dobro, baritone guitar, lapsteel & harp
Special Guest:
Roberto Luti: slide guitar on 3, 7 and 10