Category: Singer-Songwriter

TRACK | Twain – Nature Song

5/5 golden merles

“Look at those vultures fly, black against the sky, if they eat me I’ll learn how to fly.”

There must be a general reassessing.

the future is begging us to forfeit the values of tradition in the sake of the good, every day and at all times. To serve good and not habit, to form new rituals that reinforce behavior around decency and dignity.

There is embedded in this track a very faint accompanying backing vocals, chiming in at 5-10% and just adding a bit of nuance to the direct-to-handheld recorder operation. It is slightly staggered and suits the unfolding.

It feels like the future, approaching, slightly after and rising. “Go get ’em, little ones.”

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – City of Electric Light

5/5 golden merles

In 2008 I was working for Democratic Party as a field organizer on a couple of campaigns for congress and governor, but also in support of one particular presidential candidate that purported to offer hope and/or change.

I had free housing and ~$300 a week in exchange for my labor of 16 hours a day. This comes out to somewhere in the region of $3/hour before taxes. Once I tried to buy one of the regional organizers a beer and he said, “Don’t be insane, I know how much you make.” I was 22 and looked 16, but for an awful, awful beard. I was a terrible public speaker.

Soft Airplane was my reliable soundtrack for driving down from the volunteer-housing mountain-hill every morning, winding off to our shared office in downtown Madison, Indiana. The songs are deeply tied to this moment of relative youth and although I love them they are a little painful to revisit.

We were clearly on the side of good and decency, it seemed to me. The moment appeared full of potential. The technically anti-war, pro-healthcare candidate was about to win a landslide national election.

This was before the military surges, the corporate bailouts, the drone assassinations, the heritage foundation healthcare plan, the squandered supermajority, the absolved Iraq war criminals, and all the other weak-willed incrementalism that damned us and continues to provide momentum for the ongoing backlash.

I didn’t know then what Adolph Reed had accurately assessed in 1996, over a decade prior:

“…a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future… We have to do better.”

I am both somewhat nostalgic for this sense of purpose and opportunity in youth to fulfill it and ashamed of it, the actual legacy and faith in a couple of morally compromised figureheads. I am also ashamed that I made a lot of good friends that I immediately lost contact with after the election. I will hope to do better going forward and continue to relish the capacity for change.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

5/5 golden merles

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | Myers Rooney – I Hope It Is Only A Room

5/5 golden merles

The latter significance of things is sometimes not clear upon the initial impressions or even after years of insistent exposure.

Years later some sense memory has attained a monumental symbolic personal value, or someone says something offhand that sparks an unrelated but crushing recollection or onrush of nostalgia.

Once I had a friend who had a Facebook page. And upon that page I inadvertently saw that one of her other friends wrote about a longing for a shared period of time, for when they lived collectively in a dormitory.

They wrote that often they’ll see something funny or good online and get so excited to run across the hallway and show it directly, to experience the thing together. But that period has passed… a sequence of shared moments that approximated happiness.

And now they can text it over. And get a response in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But it isn’t the same, they wrote, the hallway that leads out of the room doesn’t lead directly to my friend and her laugh.

TRACK | Julia Shapiro – Wrong Time

5/5 golden merles

Some are buoyed by commiseration, while others feel expressions of despondency, however melodic and articulate, an anchor on their otherwise relatively elevated existence. Down to the ‘biggest lie’ tribute, you probably already know which way you feel by now.

I am in the former camp described above and appreciate the well-crafted confessional. There are what seem like eons in which my own attempts at articulation can only occupy the space of “musings and broodings on why it is I can’t create.”

And that contradiction at least keeps things moving or maintains “the act of telling”/creating in some semblance of practiced form.

And this is a superb track that seems to fall into that field of vision. It’s a very good track and I’ll give the album more time when there is more time.


TRACK | Dana Gavanski – Catch

5/5 golden merles

Sometimes the world can be pushed forward a millimeter at a time and other times a yard. And it is not always possible to tell which we are engaged in while the action is taken or underway. Further, we are lucky if at any given moment we are able to tell which direction is forward.

But at least in this instance it is clear to me that this is a fine and good gesture toward something worthwhile.

And, similarly, it is both necessary and good to proceed in a manner which leaves a bridge for those we’ve left behind.

Gavanski’s “Yesterday is Gone” contains a lot of bridges forward. Catch, One by One, and Good Instead of Bad all have featured on a variety of mixes, and I am very much also looking forward to her output [[[going forward]]].

TRACK | Peter Johnston RVA – Chaste Heart, Pagan Land

5/5 golden merles

Let us end the year here upon this arbitrary list with an entry that features a mite less dread and, instead, a bit of optimism and indeed rejoicing.

Despite the marching, somewhat ominous build on the drummed intro, there is soon unveiled within a great compulsion to do and be well.

Rarely do songs capture this drive. It is a rarity to maintain the dramatic sense of the sweeping within this sort of explicitly declarative phrasing. And it is genuinely endearing to contain a chorus of “Underneath it all, I’m having so much fun.”

A great dichotomy there. You can see a semblance stylistically – but also in regard to content – with the kindred spirits of Stuart Murdoch and Jens Lekman. And it seems to me as though Peter is a more religious cousin of these indie rock luminaries, nevertheless politely kicking ass.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – Nights that Won’t Happen

5/5 golden merles

The bittersweet hyper articulation of this track is a confluence of it’s melody and meaning. But not only the melody, some sweetness is derived from the clarity, it’s own kind of joy.

Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night / Have no doubt about it, hon’, the dead will do alright / Go contemplate the evidence, I guarantee you’ll find / the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind

From David Berman’s Actual Air:

From Cantos for James Michener: Part II
CI.

The jets move slowly through the sky like they’ll never
reach Denver or wherever they’re going,

and I have the feeling that people are high-fiving nearby,

spontaneously, like a saloon brawl where everyone
suddenly starts fighting as if each man has
a preconscious knowledge of which side he’s on
when he enters a crowded room.

And this fight starts with a Polish joke that a man
at the bar begins to tell, but it’s not funny
as it concerns a stillborn child and an alcoholic
slain by the last European wolf, and even after
three hours there is no punchline in sight.

When he reaches the part where a Polish scientist
who has been navigating through millimeters of wilderness
discovers sub-atomic temples in a rust sample,
none of the men are listening,

they are thinking about their own childhoods

about the deep embarrassment of scoring on your own team

and the view from falling behind.

TRACK | Casey Wells – Archive

5/5 golden merles

Songs can suffer from overworking and mismanagement of resources. This is the opposite of that. There’s so much subtle detailing throughout outfitted to the 63 second run time that it probably punches at least 64lbs above its weight. Welterweights beware.

The cultural conditioning around genres (that I also am awash and dissolving within) here is present but the attention to the construction is orchestral and there is a rich/great breadth to the soundscape.

I am am a sucker for a bit of texture and field recording phasing in to the pop-core, and after revolving about the track, which helps to ground it in a place and time, and provides a context to err out of or embrace. but either way a nice stage to move on.

TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

5/5 golden merles

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.