Preston Girard

For Lawrence native Preston Girard, the decision to leave his hometown in 1997 to pursue an acting career in Chicago must have held some measure of anxiety. Yet it’s hard to gauge whether Girard’s thoughts on the subject, as expressed on the title cut of his latest self-released effort, Simple Life, are meant to carry the sort of ambivalence they communicate: I could live a simple life/Have myself a little wife/Settle down in a little town/Spread the good all around/Yeah, I’ve seen it happen. Girard delivers these lyrics with force, almost threateningly, but with little hint of resolution. It might be a healthy play at personal introspection, but it’s also the sort of one-sided conversation that hardly makes for an engaging statement.

Over the past five years, Girard’s focus has slowly shifted from acting to music. Combining his father’s knack for poetry (his dad is writer James Preston Girard) with his own musical instincts, Girard began writing songs between auditions and slowly built up a list of originals while busking at open-mic nights. Since releasing a five-track demo in 1999, Girard has been putting music first.

Although Simple Life represents a step forward in a budding career, it lacks conviction — Girard still comes off like an actor playing a role. The talent’s there — he ranges from edgy shuffles to driving rock — but the all-encompassing sense of personal involvement that dominates the best singer-songwriter work is conspicuously absent. In other words, Girard needs to open up his own simple life to a few more complications.