Not too long ago, I was stuck in the car for four and a half hours with a limited collection of CDs, having foolishly left the bulk of the collection buried in the trunk. I listened to the CDs within reach, but tired of the inordinately stressful procedure of looking away from the road and fiddling the discs out of their cases and into the CD player. By the time I reached Iron & Wine’s The Shepherd’s Dog, the stress of switching CDs had burned me out. When the disc ended and skipped back to the first track, “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car,” I shrugged and left it in. When it ended a second time, I skipped straight to the fourth track, “Carousel,” and listened through to the end again.
When I bought the album four years ago, I struggled with it. When I thought “Iron & Wine,” I thought The Creek Drank the Cradle. I thought quiet acoustic guitars and Sam Beam’s breathy, cooing voice. I though lo-fi and I thought bearded guy in a bedroom. In the Reins—Beam’s album with Calexico—threw me for a bit of a loop. But I rolled with it. I took the bearded guy out of the bedroom and put him in a cantina. Voila! Iron & Wine with a Latin flavor!
But The Shepherd’s Dog? Woman King had hinted at this new direction, but I didn’t buy it. My favorite song on Woman King was “My Lady’s House”—a gentle, strumming number that made me think of fireflies on warm summer nights (the jangling percussion?). But Beam was tired of the bearded troubadour act and wanted to do something else. And he ended up with The Shepherd’s Dog. On first listen, too proud to admit dislike or bemusement, I confessed to indifference. “What did you think of it, Taylor?” “Oh…I don’t know…so-so? I guess I liked the melody of ‘Lovesong Of the Buzzard’ and the old-school Iron & Wine of “Resurrection Fern,” but the rest of the album just seemed weird. You know? The tribal percussion stuff? The shimmering keyboard underbellies to ‘Peace Beneath the City’ and ‘Carousel’? Seems like too much…don’t know what he was thinking…”
And I remained more or less indifferent for years. I played it every once in a while, but my opinion didn’t shift much at all. But then I listened to it a few weeks ago on that trip and everything was suddenly different. To what (or whom) do I owe this sea change? The album grew on me—shockingly, unexpectedly—and suddenly, it sounded fantastic.
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One of my favorite faux-critical terms that I use when discussing music is “grower.” “That album,” I’d say, “that one’s a grower. Give it some time. You can’t judge it on the first listen! That’s not the kind of album it is!” I think we’ve all said this sort of thing at one point or another. Some albums out there are “growers.” You like a track or two on the first listen, but the rest seems sort of flat.
Examples? Personally, I’d name Dan Fogelberg’s The Innocent Age, The National’s Boxer, Gram Parson’s The Grievous Angel, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, The Rural Alberta Advantage’s Hometowns…and the list goes on. They stand out in my memory for my initial dismissal of them—I find that I never disliked any of these growers at first, merely found them a bore—but then later went back and reclaimed them.
But there are, I would offer, two distinct kinds of growers. Boxer, for example, went right over my head on first listen. Subsequent listens brought out the subtle textures and the clever lyrical turns that the first few listens couldn’t quite do justice. For a while, every new listen brought additional nuances to ear. Rage Against the Machine, on the other hand, I could not connect with for a long time. I discovered later on that it takes some angst and anger to appreciate that album. You’ve got to be a little pissed off. Sometimes you have to feel something first to appreciate an album at all.
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But that’s probably not a surprise for most of us. We all remember watching films as children and being confused by (or ignoring entirely) the sexual innuendo that seems so obvious when we rewatch the same film as teenagers or adults. This is an extreme example. There are other, more understated ideas and emotions apply as well. Can you really appreciate The Sun Also Rises without the experience of traveling in a foreign country? (I haven’t done very much foreign traveling, but I’ve heard this sentiment about Hemingway aired before.) Will you cry at Where The Red Fern Grows if you’ve never had a pet? (Probably.)
Often it’s not an issue of the music being overcomplicated or layered or nuanced…instead, it’s an issue of the listener. Sometimes we’re not ready for music (or films or books, etc.). When The Sun Also Rises clicks for you as you sit in a Parisian café, the solution seems obvious. But what about The Shepherd’s Dog? Why did it click as I drove over the Hudson River? Did I only need to escape the zoned-out, earphone mentality? Beam was clearly done with writing alone-in-bedroom music; maybe “Carousel” is a kind of meditative road song. Who knows? It’s a grower! As for Beam’s latest collection, Kiss Each Other Clean, well…I didn’t take to it. But maybe it’ll grow on me. Or rather, now that I think about it, maybe I’ll grow on it.
Any favorite “growers” of your own? Leave comments below!
this blog. it's a grower!
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