Month: April 2019

No Good When I’m Alone: Out on the wire with Shovels & Rope

.Reading time 9 minutes.

blood

Is it true that perfect love casts out fear? You’re liable to think so after spending time with the seventh Shovels & Rope album, a simultaneously tender- and lionhearted record called By Blood. Since last we heard from them, the husband-wife team of Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst have become parents a second time over, and they spend these 10 new songs wrestling with family and all of its attending anxieties: How can two shambling and fallible human beings possibly do right by their precious and vulnerable progeny, let alone each other, here in the world where things fall apart and moth and rust destroy? If those questions put you in the headspace of Birds of Chicago and their beloved Real Midnight, another heartfelt reckoning with parental jitters, then God bless you. But where the Birds waxed eschatological, seeking joy and peace in a world hellbent on its own destruction, the Shovels document a more internal struggle: What they’re weighing here are the rigorous demands of family life against the dearths and deficiencies they bring into it. “I’ve been a disappointment from time to time,” understates Hearst in “The Wire,” and what spouse or parent or sibling couldn’t relate? The harsh light and high stakes of responsibility illuminate personal failings with a surgical precision, and Shovels & Rope devote more than a few bars to cataloging the ways they come up short. (“I’m prone to swing at mirrors/ I interrupt slow talkers/ And I need everyone to like me,” Hearst sings, an unsparing self-review.) But if family’s a pressure cooker, it can also be a support group, resource center, rehab program, and indeed a lifeboat for the shambling fools who see their own imperfections in light of their beloved and realize that they’re better off sticking together. “I’m looking out for you,” Trent thunders in one song. “Are you looking out for me?” In another, Hearst gives her answer: “I won’t fail you when I walk out on the wire,” she vows, determined not to let her anxieties become sandbags when her tribe’s counting on her to stay aloft. Maybe no family’s love is perfect, and maybe no parent is ever truly without fear—but at a minimum, By Blood bears witness to the emboldening effects of belonging.

These songs teem with joy and tension, failure and glory, so it’s only fitting that they’re married to the most unruly arrangements of any Shovels & Rope record to date. Trent and Hearst recorded the album at home and played most of the parts themselves, and the resulting collection pushes roots-rock austerity into the grubby margins of tumult and din. Scrappy acoustic guitar chords share space with pummeling drums and gnarled riffs, all while synths hiss and gurgle in the background, husband and wife crooning and yelping, raging and moaning. Just as the songs testify to the sanctifying effects of domesticity, the music finds clarity and sweetness within some of the harshest elements of the country and rock idioms: “The Wire” is razor-edged new wave, cool punk verses exploding into a boisterous chorus, while the fiddle-led “Hammer” dishevels its own folksy flourishes with lurching beats and cacophonous swells of noise. For a band that built its reputation on rustic simplicity, they conjure arrestingly vivid hues on “I’m Coming Out,” where the stomp and fuzz of The Black Keys collides with the psychedelic swirl of The Beatles, and they spark ignition out of the fumes of resentment on “Mississippi Nothin,’” which distills Springsteen’s blue-collar indignation into a four-minute primal howl. Most of the lyrics are delivered by the duo in frayed and not-quite-perfect harmonies, their voices bleeding into one another just as the tail end of one song bleeds into the opening strains of the next: They share sweet, single-mic intimacy in the wistful “Good Old Days,” and call out to one another from across the world or maybe just across a crowded bar on the dog-eared power ballad “Carry Me Home.”

All that bleeding befits an album about how the lives we share, their joys and their sorrows, spurn any effort at imposed order or segregation. By Blood arrives mere weeks after Julia Jacklin’s Crushing, a study in the perils of proximity, and in many ways makes for an illuminating counterpoint: Jacklin warned against the inevitable loss of self that comes from union with another, but Shovels & Rope often sound like they’re finding themselves through entanglement. “I’m Coming Out” references metamorphosis and beholds a transformation– at the beginning Hearst says she’s weak and small, by the end she’s suited for battle and ready to draw blood– but the song’s not a before-and-after so much as a both-and, an admission of how relationship can haul our best and worst selves to the surface, where they co-exist and frequently butt heads. Sometimes, transformation seems impossible. “Mississippi Nothin'” documents two people who’ve known each other since they were kids and now find themselves on the opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum; for the life of him our narrator can’t figure out how he wound up on the bad side of the chasm, nor how to make up the distance. And in “The Wire,” Hearst confesses “I’m no better than I’ll ever be,” a frank admission of limitation that might remind you of a Bob Dylan lyric (“as great as you are, man, you’ll never be greater than yourself”). Other songs are more hopeful: “C’mon Utah!” is set just after the collapse of a quasi-hypothetical border wall, and finds a dad riding like hell to reunite with the family from whom he was separated; and “Hammer,” a scruffy take on the traditional work song, could very well be about the unglamorous and never-ending labor of self-improvement. These songs are aspirational, their characters imperfect but straining for something better, and the Shovels convey the strain as something holy in its own right. Consider “Good Old Days,” where Trent sings to his partner: “Now you’ve been reborn, and I’m still a mouse in a maze/ And I’m singing out to you.” It’s wrenching not least for how viscerally he hungers and thirsts for righteousness, longing for something his beloved has and he knows he lacks. Tellingly, she’s singing the same words right back to him; the pursuit of righteousness is the work of a lifetime, it seems, and it’s not meant to be done in isolation. “I’m no good when I’m alone,” howls Trent in “Carry Me Home,” a line that may as well be the record’s thesis statement; in every sense, By Blood ratifies the sanctity of union, and affirms two strivers and seekers who are better for having found one another.

So I’ll Know What it Feels Like: On Sara Bareilles’ plausible deniability

.Reading time 8 minutes.

amidst the chaos

When Sara Bareilles announced the release of her sixth album, she promised a patchwork of love songs, breakup ballads, and hymns to the exemplary grace and decency of the Obamas. It’s that last part that suggests Amidst the Chaos as a topical affair, one that lingers over faded glories as a way of avoiding contemporary traumas, but the songs themselves are more circumspect, and better because of it. Only on the closing “A Safe Place to Land,” where Bareilles and John Legend pronounce a benediction of courage over border detainees, does the album’s currency become irrefutable. Everywhere else, plausible deniability abounds. You could listen to any one of these songs and reasonably assume it’s about romantic triumph or folly. And yet, there’s plentiful insinuation that these songs were marinated in the times; as critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes, the album’s very title is a valuable and blunt shorthand for what life feels like in America circa 2019, and if Bareilles’ songs don’t have political weariness as their object, they suggest it as their point of view. In a masterclass of subtext, implication, and poetic imagining, Bareilles bears witness to what it means to maintain a joyful countenance when a rancorous national mood sweeps into the cracks and fissures of everyday living; what hard work it is, and how necessary. Meditate, if you will, on the words of “If I Can’t Have You,” a wistful chronicle of having, losing, and choosing gratitude over regret: “If I can’t have you/ then I’ll have to find a way to get through/ Though I don’t want to/ I have to do my best to recall/ That I’m thankful that I held you at all.” She could be looking back on a lost love or an evaporated civilization; either way, who couldn’t relate? There’s also “Saint Honesty,” where Bareilles summons the better angels of candor and truth—the truth that sets captives free and clears our path through any manner of bullshit. And what about “Eyes on You,” where the world’s spinning fast and out of control, but Bareilles chooses to hold her head high and keep her eye on the prize. Make of it what you will, and apply it to whatever tribulations buffet you. Its admonishment is simple and profound: Know hope. These songs are confident in their point of view, which means they don’t have to trip over themselves to pluck references from the latest headlines; they do something more valuable by capturing the blustery weather of a tumultuous planet, acknowledging the way in which cultural turmoil bleeds into personal dislocation, and providing sanity-saving articulations of resilience.

More than any of the five albums that preceded it, Amidst the Chaos makes its case through understatement and reserve. Up to this point, Bareilles has always thrived by blowing up her Carole King troubadour roots into widescreen, Technicolor pop confections; she knows how to apply studio sheen to sturdy bones, which is how “Love Song” became ubiquitous without becoming obnoxious. But to make Amidst the Chaos she stepped outside of her comfort zone, enlisting the venerable T-Bone Burnett to produce. He surrounds Bareilles’ piano with a multitude of session pros, among them mighty drummers Jay Bellerose and Jim Keltner; bass stalwart Dennis Crouch; ax slinger Marc Ribot; soundscaper Keefus Ciancia; and Milk Carton Kid Joey Ryan on harmonies. They stick to small gestures and intimate performances, warm and largely acoustic but never austere or inert. Burnett’s reputation is as a folklorist, and he does help Bareilles trace some of her roots; she sticks to the bluesy low end of her piano on the rumbling “Armor,” writes stately gospel in “Saint Honesty,” and creates shimmering soul perfection in the gently propulsive “If I Can’t Have You,” the kind of song you’d love to hear on an album by the Tedeschi Trucks Band. But what Burnett understands is just how little polish Bareilles needs for her songs to sound colorful and epic, which many of these do: “Eyes on You” sprints toward euphoria, while the opening “Fire” stokes glowing embers into a raging chorus. Just like Bareilles’ words, the performances convey clear emotions without overselling, her dramatist’s zeal kept in check by her devotion to careful songcraft.

Blessedly, Bareilles finds space for peace within the chaos: Reprieves come in the sultry sway of “Miss Simone” and the smoky reverie “Someone Who Loves Me”—the former a scene of everyday tenderness and romance, the latter a trust fall into the arms of an unfailing partner. She allows herself to shed light on all she’s (we’ve?) lost in the twinkling melancholy of “No Such Thing,” but ultimately realizes the futility in obsessing over the past (“I can’t fix it by fixating on a rewind,” she acknowledges.) That’s not to say that the past can’t illuminate the present. Check the bellicose “Armor,” where Bareilles traces a lineage of strength and resilience that runs through all the women who’ve come before; “strength means blessed with an enemy,” she intones, her resolve forged in the fire of tribulation and emboldened by the generations that blazed her trail. And in “Orpheus,” she spins familiar lore into an allegory of perseverance. “Hold me in the dark and when the day appears/ We’ll say we did not give up on love today,” Bareilles pleads; love blooms and hope springs in the land of the dead, because where else are such things to happen? These songs are saturated in joyful intent even as they’re littered with signs o’ the times, and none strike that balance more rousingly than “Fire.” Here, Bareilles documents a love she thought would last, now reduced to ash and rubble. “Someday, I won’t have to feel the cold/ But I do now so I’ll know/ What it feels like when I feel fire,” she declares. It’s a prophetic word for anyone enduring cruel winter, but knowing in their hearts that springtime will come again. No need to spell it out further: You know exactly what it is she’s talking about.

Always Been in My Nature: Josh Ritter’s history of violence

.Reading time 10 minutes.

fever breaks

Like Martin Scorsese and Cormac McCarthy, Josh Ritter is drawn to histories of violence. In songs about misbegotten wars and gun-toting vigilantes, he’s traced the gnarled roots of American bloodshed, untangling the particular strains of solitude and exceptionalism that give birth to sainted renegades and self-justifying killers. These themes are well-documented in the folk tradition, and Ritter presents them in all their dread and allure. Consider a song like “The Temptation of Adam,” where two lovers fumble to make a life together in the shadow of the atom bomb, its imagery suggesting that the instinct to unleash carnage looms large over even our best intentions and purest inclinations; it’s emblematic of Ritter’s dogged chronicle of our collective heart of darkness. Consider also a composition from his album So Runs the World Away, where Ritter rummages through the haunted graveyard of American song and story for scenes of brutality and vengeance, assembling them into stomach-churning pastiche. The title of the song: “Folk Bloodbath.” In it, Ritter sounds like Indiana Jones coming face to face with the flesh-melting power of the Ark of the Covenant: A committed scholar and folklorist, he’s dug too deep and seen too much to return unrattled to the land of the living.

Fever Breaks—Ritter’s 10th studio album—opens with the kind of song he was born to write; not merely a continuation of his excavations, but one of the deepest digs yet. “Ground Don’t Want Me” is a gunfighter ballad, belonging to a folk lineage that encompasses both Marty Robbins’ big-iron epics and Guy Clark’s wistful revisions. Ritter inhabits a man living under a curse (“you’ll never get to heaven, son, so go to hell real slow”), fated to roam the Earth as an unbeatable quick-draw. No matter how many impossible, hopelessly outgunned situations he puts himself in, he somehow always blazes his way out and leaves a pile of bodies in his wake (“for every man a box, for every hole a rose”). He becomes a kind of ghost, wandering from town to town weighed down by his murderous guilt, envying the many men he’s sent to peaceful rest but unable to find it himself. The song reveals a writer who’s all but unequalled at finessed metaphors (“I’ve stacked the deck, I’ve held a dead man’s hand so many times”) and mordant prose (“in every town the brokenhearted rang their steeple bells”), but it’s his moral clarity that cuts deepest; Ritter’s gunfighter is being eaten alive by sin and shame, and he’s resigned to the fact that his past has prescribed his future, that the blood he’s shed has stained his soul. (Devotees may find it rewarding to imagine that this is the same boastful gun from 2007’s “Mind’s Eye,” brought low by time and conscience.)  Later in the album, Ritter reckons with an even ancienter tradition in his hardscrabble performance of “Silver Blade,” a song he originally wrote for Joan Baez; it’s a murder ballad about a maiden who escapes her villainous captor only by lodging a knife between his ribs, then using the same blade to dig the man’s unconsecrated grave. The lyrics include an insouciant forensic account of the deceased’s worm-ridden body, corporeal evidence of a toppled tyrant and lawless justice. It’s a mythology of violence rendered in flesh and bone; it establishes Fever Breaks as another folk bloodbath.

It might almost be unbearable were it not also exhilarating—a robust and freewheeling record that’s unlike any he’s made before. For that you can give much of the credit to folk hero/rock and roll warrior Jason Isbell, who produced the record in Nashville and plays on it with his well-decorated band the 400 Unit. Their most obvious contribution is muscle, and in “Old Black Magic” they provide the headliner with the most raucous moment of garage-rock mayhem in his entire catalog; he sings himself ragged just to be heard about the din of the guitars and the bleat of an organ. Yet Isbell and his troupe are as much about brains as brawn, and what makes them so symbiotic with Ritter is how nimbly they can adapt to the needs of his rich, varied songwriting: The 400 Unit crunches and grinds on “Losing Battles,” skips and gallops across “On the Water,” conjures dark storm clouds and ominous flashes of lighting on the sinister and dramatic “The Torch Committee.” Boon accompanist Amanda Shires, a blessing to every record she’s on, gives “Silver Blade” its sharp edges through flinty fiddle playing, while the band digs deep for both groove and twang on the loping “A New Man.” For all the ground covered here, Isbell’s most critical effect is to bring focus: Fever Breaks feels clean and compact with its 10 songs in 45 minutes, almost the opposite of Gathering’s rambling generosity.

The depth and breadth of these performances are the backdrop for wide-ranging Ritter originals that interrogate folk forms and elucidate all the lessons he’s learned about our appetite for destruction—one of the most significant lessons being that the true violence is the inner violence, the most rancorous battle the battle against the self. Ritter pines for rebirth in “A New Man,” and over the din of “Losing Battles” he casts the pursuit of justice as both a noble calling and a fool’s errand (“sometimes the righteous win,” he sings—but most times…). That same song suggests a history of violence encoded in human DNA, situating these calamitous mythologies under the Mark of Cain; “it’s always been in my nature to be the beast,” Ritter admits, facing down the man in the mirror like Nick Lowe did in “The Beast in Me” or Richard Thompson in “The Rattle Within.” Elsewhere, Fever Breaks studies the violence of separation. “I Still Love You (Now and Then),” one of Ritter’s most brutally understated divorce songs, finds a lovesick man chronicling the wreckage of his life as though describing the ruins of a battle field. But perhaps the greatest lesson of Fever Breaks is that violence to others is always, ultimately, violence to the self. “The Torch Committee” is the album’s dramatic fulcrum, a political allegory narrated in detached deadpan and outlining step-by-step the ways in which fear is weaponized to divide a people from itself (“sadly it’s the awful truth/ it’s them or us, it’s them or you”). And in “All Some Kind of Dream,” Ritter surveys the state of our crumbling ideals through the eyes of the immigrant and the refugee; the wayfaring stranger and the kids in the cages: “There was a time when we held them close/ and weren’t so cruel, low, and mean/ And we did good unto the least of these/ or was it all some kind of dream?” It’s a psalm of lament for a country that’s lost itself in an abattoir of its own making, but in the closing “Blazing Highway Home,” Ritter dares to dream there’s a road to peace somewhere, in this world or the next. It’s not much to go on, but when even hope can seem like a losing battle, it may be just enough for now.

Whistles Right Past You: Andrew Bird says to hell with this

.Reading time 10 minutes.

my finest

“I’m coming to the brink of a great disaster,” sings Andrew Bird on his new album, persuasively titled My Finest Work Yet. “The end just has to be near.” It’s not the first time he’s portended the apocalypse. More than a decade ago, on an album called The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Bird painted a strangely reassuring picture of societal collapse, even promising there’d be snacks. These days, his outlook is less rosy. “The Earth spins faster, whistles right past you/ whispers death in your ear,” Bird laments. Those whispers come in different keys— gun violence, rising tides, the dead ends of nationalism— but while these 10 new songs are littered with the ruins of empire (“they say Rome wasn’t built in a day/ but it all came down in the month of May”), the larger issue is how the hard work of neighborly love and participative democracy has been replaced by the comfort and convenience of disembodied online rancor. Bird’s distressed but never despairing record is a challenge to log off of Twitter and get back to the grind; it’s both a call to activism and a clarification of what meaningful activism actually entails. “No more excuses, no more apathy,” one song says; the world groans under the weight of indifference, but My Finest Work Yet lights a fire. “We’re gonna turn it around,” Bird pledges, because what other choice do we have? As Flannery O’Connor would say, the life you save may be your own.

Bird underscores the high stakes with some of his most direct writing to date—though such things are always relative. He still rattles off wry tongue-twisters (“for those who sit recalcitrant and taciturn/ you know I’d rather turn and burn than scale this edifice”), and pivots easily to historic allusion (“it feels like 1936/ in Catalonia”). Jokes about J. Edgar Hoover bump up against references to King Ghidora, and just leave it to Andrew Bird to contextualize some of his most straight-ahead topical truisms (“history forgets the moderates”) within a retelling of Greek myth. Sisyphus, legendarily forced to spend eternity rolling a heavy stone up a mountain, has long been an emblem of complacency or addiction, and Bird’s iteration makes sure to acknowledge the collateral damage left in his wake (“had a house down there but I lost it long ago”). But where the Sisyphus of lore remains eternally stuck in his rut, Bird’s character has enough, and becomes a hero just for refusing to push his burden any further. “Did he raise both fists and say, ‘to hell with this’/ And just let the rock roll?” Bird asks, finding holy purpose in noncompliance. The song becomes a wondrous meditation on the blessedness of whole-assing when half measures offer greater comfort: “I’d rather fail like a mortal than flail like a god,” Bird’s Sisyphus thunders, preferring a leap of faith into the abyss over remaining in stasis any longer.

But Bird neither fails nor flails here. My Finest Work Yet does indeed feel like a consolidation of strengths—plucky, funny, sophisticated, tuneful. You’ll only need to listen to these songs a time or two before you’re able to whistle along, something Bird does often, imbuing his songs with just the twist of whimsy or shadow of menace they require. The whimsy is balanced by a jostling physicality; Bird produced the album with Paul Butler, favoring live vocal takes and the crackling energy of a small band—splashes of piano, upright bass, guitar, crisp snare pops and cavernous rim shots from boon drummer Abraham Rounds. Bird’s violin is the anchor, gently plinking out tunes and then cresting into ravishing melody. His music can conjure a full range of motion, and several songs sound like they were made to move bodies: “Proxy War” rises and falls with the buoyant bounce of Motown, while “Don the Struggle” works like a wind-up toy, a stately march suddenly exploding into frenzied dance. Even working in an intimate framework, Bird shows an easy way with dramatic build-up: “Archipelago” has enough whoah-ohs to fuel an Arcade Fire song, while “Olympians” gallops and then sprints on its way to a fist-pumping chorus.

In every way, these are songs of action and idealism, even as they acknowledge inertia’s sweet seductions. “Bloodless,” a slinky cabaret, imagines a moral landscape where the good guys equivocate, the evil are truly evil, and most of us stagnate in the murky middle; we just “hem and we haw,” Bird opines, and you sense that he’d almost rather you goose-step with the fascists than sit on the bench. (“Because you are lukewarm,” a relevant Bible verse says, “I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”) Bird posits that the powerful have a vested interest in sowing division, just so long as it doesn’t bubble over into actual revolt: “They’re banking on the sound and fury,” he observes. “Makes you wonder what it’s all got to do with me.” He answers his own question on “Fallorun,” where gossamer violin notes build into U2-worthy euphoria, and where the state of our union has plenty to do with all of us. “We could have been together/ But you couldn’t stand the weather here,” he mourns, and he could be talking either to a faithless lover, a wayward neighbor, or anyone who’s ever talked a big game but then buckled when the shit hit the fan. The song appeals to those who take a stand without making a sacrifice, channeling all their moral fervor into empty and ego-stoking gestures. “You think you’re making choices,” Bird sings, “But there’s no one really here/ Just tone-deaf angry voices/ That are breathing in your ear.”

Bird’s idealism may initially scan as overly earnest, but what he’s offering here is counterprogramming for a kind of false idealism, the one that says the people who talk the loudest are making the biggest difference. Crucially, for all the album’s concern with bridge-building, My Finest Work Yet doesn’t dispute the existence of injustice, nor does it suggest we acquiesce to it. Enemies are invoked a few times; an oblique reference to an abominable “Man of the Year” entry is the closest Bird gets to naming a particular boogeyman, while on the winding “Archipelago” he suggests that we define ourselves largely by the people we choose to hate. But while Bird spurns fearmongers, he stops short of disdaining them, understanding it to be short-sided and self-destructive to do so: “Now there are no sides,” he moans, democracy’s wreckage strewn at his feet. “Try selling that one to an angry mob.” He understands what James Baldwin was talking about when he said, “what you do to me, you do to you”—that ultimately, we sink or swim together, that violence to the Other is violence to our whole body. That’s why My Finest Work Yet bets everything on the painful and necessary work of incarnation and intimacy; in “Proxy War,” online discourse is contrasted with “real life,” where words have the power to draw blood and stop time. In “Sisyphus,” love is the precipitating force in our hero’s unburdening; “it’s got nothing to do with fate and everything to do with you,” he confesses to an unnamed beloved. And in the closing “Bellevue Bridge Club,” Bird threatens to pull his slumbering partner out of bed and onto the floor, promising paradigm-altering, empathy raising scenes “of life beyond your front door.” There, just across the threshold, opportunity abounds for connection, for justice, for truth and reconciliation—but unless we’re vigilant, it’ll all whistle right past us.