Saturday Songs Jan. 28

1. “Six O’Clock News” – Kathleen Edwards

When I saw her name on a list of recent releases, I knew that I had seen it before, but I couldn’t quite place it. However, the first review I read explained away my half-hearted acquaintance with Edwards; she is the girlfriend of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, a fact that figured into several of the seemingly thousands of magazine features that have been written about Vernon and his music. But Edwards, as it turns out, should figure just as much as Vernon in a conversation about the changing landscape of folk- and alt-country-derived pop music.

But as good as her latest album Voyageur is, I looked back this week to her 2003 debut album Failer. The lead track chronicles the death of a lowlife criminal with the same honesty and accuracy that the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood puts into his tunes about the white trash of the south. Unlike the current record, which finds Edwards and Vernon (who produced the record) playing around more with the texture of the sound, this album is tried-and-true alt-country, the kind of fare you get from Ryan Adams in his brighter moments. Edwards’s voice is the real winner. While it sounds smooth enough, there is a suggestion of roughness around the edges. Unlike brighter-sounding country singers like Alison Krauss or Emmylou Harris, there is a hard-won believability to her voice.

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2. “Desert Dream” – Larkin Poe

LISTEN HERE

Why I haven’t heard more about Larkin Poe in the musical press is a mystery to me. Sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell started off with third sister Jessica in the aptly titled ensemble The Lovell Sisters before Jessica moved on and her sisters reformed as Larkin Poe. Although the sisters are grounded in a thorough knowledge of country and bluegrass forms and are approaching the status of virtuosos on their respective instruments (Rebecca on mandolin and Megan on dobro), over the course of their four EPs they are moving steadily closer to country-pop fare. While the songwriting is spotty in places, they more than make up for it with their singing and their playing.

I pick “Desert Dream” more or less at random from their discography, but it does a good job of representing their work as a whole. While distinctly coming out of country—for instance, the dobro haunting the seams of the song—it is also clearly moving towards a hazy, dream pop. The production possesses a sparkle and polish that you wouldn’t normally get from a bluegrass outfit and features several well-placed embellishments (triangle hits!).

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3. “Wild Folk” – Jim Bryson and the Weakerthans

Another Canadian songwriter who emerged from the woodwork (meaning Spotify! …and Edwards is also Canadian), Bryson teamed up with the Weakerthans for his album The Falcon Lake Incident (which refers to a famous UFO encounter). The presence of a full band really helps to color Bryson’s tunes; his other work is just as good, but it remains a little skeletal in comparison with The Falcon Lake Incident. “Wild Folk” might be the best example of how well this new arrangement works. The opening seconds feature only Bryson and his guitar—which is pleasant enough—but the song truly opens up once the band comes in.

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4. “Heart of the Continent” – John K. Samson

Can anyone sense my path of exploration this week? It’s Canadian music, for those unfamiliar with Samson, who is of the aforementioned Weakerthans. Samson’s 2012 album Provincial is essentially an exercise in emotional geography that you should read the lyrics to as you listen. I’m so excited by my forthcoming exploration of Samson’s lyrics (“And our demolitions punctuate / all we mean to say, then leave too late. / So I'll make my shaky exclamation mark / with a hand full of the crumpled dark”) that I’m tempted to start on some analysis right here, but I’ll set that aside for a future post.

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5. “Earthquakes” – Danger & The Steel Cut Oats

With a totally weird and unpromising band name, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this recommendation, which came from my friend Sarah. But the band proved themselves more than capable of playing a fine mix of country and bluegrass with some equally fine songwriting. In that they straddle the line between traditional forms and pop music, they’re not too far from Larkin Poe territory. And you can download their EP for free! I know that I’ve been slacking on the free music output recently, but hopefully I can appease everyone with this 6-track offering.

My Spotify Salvation

Yesterday I took the plunge. All it took was a burning desire to listen to the Gourds, a definite lack of the Gourds on my iTunes, a Visa debit card, and…oh, I don’t know…a dose of free spirit. Yes. As of 24 hours ago, I am officially a Spotify subscriber. (For the curious, I am not a “Premium” subscriber, but only an “Unlimited” subscriber.) The monthly fee for the serves is $4.99, which is just about $60 per annum to stream unlimited music…and more music than you can find on iTunes most of the time. There are still some great streaming services available for free online—a favorite of mine is Grooveshark—but none of them match up to the organization, audio quality, and sheer range of tunes provided by Spotify.

I should admit something: I did not start paying for Spotify because I felt guilty or because I wanted to or even because I thought all those independent musicians out there deserved a few more coins to jangle in their pockets. I started paying because I had to. According to the contract of those who download Spotify for free, not only do you have to start coughing up the money after six months, but also you are only given two weeks using Spotify for free abroad. So now here I am. Paying for Spotify. And you know what? I feel pretty good about it.

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In the past I’ve ranted about how the “physicality” of books is the trump card that they can always play over the Kindle and, while I haven’t posted anything on the blog about it, I’ve always appreciated the reality of owning a CD (or a tape or a record) as a piece of physical property. A digital album download always felt like it was too easy because of the lack of physical interaction. I click a few buttons, type in a credit card number, click a few more buttons, and voilà! the album is playing through your computer speakers. This “easiness” has always irked me in the back of my mind. I would always own a CD than a digital album (although preferably also have digital files and have the CD not in a plastic/jewel case but a cardboard one…I’m picky). A digital file just doesn’t do it for me. A digital file which I do not actually own? Maybe that’s one step in the wrong direction…

But at the end of the day, Spotify is too good to be true. There are limits on how much money I can feasibly spend on music—a problem that Spotify dashes on the rocks. Here’s a little math: let’s say that I bought every song in my iTunes…(which I haven’t…?). Assuming that I purchased all of them from the iTunes Store at 99¢ a pop, I would have spent a grand total of $12,375. More simple math? If we assume that I started listening to music (and buying it) at age eight, then I would have spent $883.92 per year on music. (Math note: I realized after I did this super-duper complicated math that not only do I have around 100-150 songs that were downloaded for free on my iTunes, but also that there are several hundred (thousand?!) songs on my hard-drive that are unaccounted for in above heady mathiness.)

Spotify? Like I said above, $4.99 per month, roughly $60 per annum. Because I’m a math major (lie), let’s do a little more math. At $60 per month, that same number of songs could have been listened to me (assuming, of course, that Spotify existed when I was eight) for a paltry total of $840…a little less than what I otherwise would have (should have…) been spending per year.

Oh. And the ads are gone. That’s a definite plus.

On Joe Purdy And "Song-stories"

As all of you are aware by now, I have a great deal of respect for songwriters who can tell stories in songs. Not first-person narration—that kind of song has difficulties of its own—but nothing is quite as difficult as the third-person song. Every single songwriter that I’ve interviewed has agreed with that sentiment. Other songwriters, such as Liz Longley, had never even thought about writing a third-person story into a song.

“I ought to try that,” she mused.

Most songwriters don’t bother with this kind of song. They can sound unwieldy and forced and they require the singer to sever the prized personal connection to the audience. It’s no secret that confessional-style songwriting, which had its heyday in the early 1970s with the heartbreaking lyrics of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, can often work wonders on an audience. When James Taylor tells the audience, “Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone,” everyone swoons at the sadness of that line.

On the other hand, a songwriter might try their hand at a song that tells the story of a few down-on-their-luck characters and the audience could only manage to wince. There’s isn't as much personal energy invested in the story. The songwriter invokes not a template of "sinner" or "culprit," but rather the less emotionally dynamic role of the "storyteller."

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Steve Earle, in a class he once taught on the songwriting of Townes Van Zandt, which I did not actually have the pleasure of attending (I read the transcript!), described Van Zandt’s songs as quintessentially philosophical. Van Zandt liked to dig deep into a personal thought and expand upon it. That’s how he ended up with striking lyrics such as those of “To Live Is To Fly.” (“We’ve all got holes to fill / and them holes are all that’s real / some fall on you like a storm / sometimes you dig your own.”)

Van Zandt, Earle is quick to point out, also has a knack for “story-songs,” but he did tend more to the philosophical. On the other hand, Van Zandt’s close friend Guy Clark is a master of the story-song, with a far weaker grasp on the philosophical fare. Consider Clark’s tune about his relationship with his step-grandfather, “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train.”

I don’t know that I exactly concur with Earle’s somewhat curt division of the world of songs, but I think that he provides a valuable template to look at. For one, it helped me move past the greatly simplistic division of “third-person” / “first-person”—songs are not so simple.

I should admit that this mention of Earle, Van Zandt, and Clark is somewhat of a digression—loosely related to the theme, but a digression nonetheless. The point of this post is to posit that Joe Purdy, with whom some of you may be familiar, is an excellent story-song writer (story-songwriter?). Ever since I saw him perform, I had that knowledge tucked away in the back of my head—having experienced the story of “Outlaws." A careful piano number, the song starts off as a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde, a man picking up a woman in a “rose pink Cadillac,” before moving on to the first hesitant robbery, then the string of bank robberies…and, despite being only Purdy’s voice and piano, the song quietly surges with tension until you find out—oh…everything ends up fine. Purdy delivers that fact of their safety not as a revelation and entirely without irony; it all simply happened that way.

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But my recent Purdy obsession came in the form of “Mary May & Bobby,” a love song about a couple that was always meant to be. The song sets its first verse in fifth grade, as an infatuated Bobby walks an oblivious Mary May home from school. Purdy’s narrator is limited to Bobby, who “was listening to every word she said / like it was the gospel of the prophecies” and “went home singing ‘Who Wrote the Book of Love’ and ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’”






Bobby is all innocence here—citing a nonexistent text (“the gospel of the prophecies”) perhaps because he doesn’t think that any actual text can capture the emotion that he feels toward Mary May. Purdy’s voice even trails off at the end of the "gospel" line with syllables that suggest the words "or something." Additionally, Bobby walks home singing two largely innocent love songs, especially the Monotones’ “The Book of Love.” In the second verse, Purdy quotes Bobby as saying that he and Mary May could “live out by the sea / like they do on the movie screen,” again drawing out that innocence; Bobby doesn’t understand love on his own terms, but he can reflect it outward through popular culture. (The “movie screen” thought, however, sticks with him through high school to his next proposal.)

The third verse introduces an actual high school romance between the couple, but a romance that is severed by Mary May’s collegiate aspirations. The first part of the verse is largely in Mary May’s voice and the second part is Bobby’s response, which follows into the  proposal chorus. That long snippet of dialogue is crucial because it temporarily removes the presence of the narrator from the story. When we return to the story, we have left Bobby’s perspective and have now been limited to Mary May. Purdy’s character development of Mary in this verse is not original or particularly inspired, but that is part of what makes the story work so well; he leaves so much for the audience to fill in.

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The fact of the matter is that the moment Purdy enters into his description of an “independent businesswoman,” you already have a full stereotype drawn out in your head. But once you start to consider her character, you realize that Purdy has literally told us nothing about her emotional life. She is lonely, yes, but that’s not much of a character trait when you consider it alongside Bobby; you’d need only to glance at Bobby’s befuddled joy on walking Mary home in the first verse to have a sense that you’re dealing with a real character. Mary May is far more one-dimensional than that.

The real shocker of this song, once you start thinking about the impact of its final verse, is that we never hear an answer from Bobby. Purdy only provides us an echo of the first verse: “It was a fine day in the fifth grade / when Mary May let Bobby walk her home from school.” Are we to take those lines as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ from Bobby to her marriage proposal? My gut reaction is to say that Purdy is making a stab for ambiguity, but it’s worth further investigating Mary’s reasoning in the previous verse.

Thanks to the limited omniscient presence provided by Purdy’s narrator, we know that Mary is motivated to go find by selfishness. She “is lonely beyond belief…[and goes] home looking for the only love she’d ever known,” admitting that whether or not she loves Bobby is besides the point; she doesn’t want to be lonely any longer. The idea that Bobby is still waiting for her after all this time is even admittedly speculation (on either the part of Mary or the narrator): “Guess he never really gave up hope.” So this entire situation might be a fantasy on the part of Mary; she "stopped writing years ago" and has no idea what Bobby's life is like. She fills in the gaps of his life...just as we, as listeners, fill in the gaps of her life. Purdy is clever because we never find out whether our suppositions hold any truth to them.

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These details that hide just beneath the surface of the song are exactly why Purdy proves himself such an excellent songwriter. The temptation with story-songs is to assume that they offer up their story at face value. Other equally worthy songs, such as Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day,” (#2) have similar telling details that more fully reveal the story going on.

Saturday Songs – Jan. 21

1. “Everything Has Changed” – William Fitzsimmons

I’ve featured Fitzsimmons previously on Saturday Songs and the more I listen to his work, the more I respect the immense sensitivity that he pours into every lyric and every line. Take this song, off his 2006 album Goodnight, which openly deals with personal issues that arose out of his parents’ divorce. Like any decent emotionally turbulent album, Fitzsimmons is careful not to apply the schmaltz too thickly; he keeps it in reserve and then injects you with it at the exact right moment.

This song pushes the envelope in terms of schmaltz, but Fitzsimmons manages it partly because he turns the final minute or so into a densely layered web of voices and delicate piano and guitar. For a song where there isn’t very much sonic input, the mix sounds monumentally large and—put your earphones in—creates the impression of an aural cocoon until everything fades out and Fitzsimmons leaves you with a final haunting image, echoing the beginning of the song, in which he comes across his father in the graveyard looking for his mother’s grave. 


The last, breathy incantation is almost better not divided into separate lines, coming across instead as a stream of images: “Last night I had a dream, I was in the graveyard, looking at my father, buried in the ground, swear that I could hear him, tell me he was sorry, and everything has changed.”

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2. “Red Travelin’ Socks” – Malcolm Middleton

Of all the Scotland-derived indie music I’ve so far explored, nothing has quite caught my fancy the way this first track of Macolm Middleton’s album Waxing Gibbous has. Starting off with a furious burst of guitar that could come straight out of The Cure, Middleton and his band pull together one hell of a power pop jam. Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit remains my favorite Scottish singer, but Middleton (a forerunner of the indie scene in Scotland with his band Arab Strap) certainly has the critical edge. Boasting a clean, warm voice, Middleton, like Hutchinson, also sings with a noticeable Scottish accent.

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3. “The Prettiest Thing” – David Childers and the Modern Don Juans

One of the regular cover tunes canvassed by the Avett Brothers in their live shows, “The Prettiest Thing” is a simple, twangy country song at heart, especially in its original version. There’s not a lot to offer about this song; it’s an unassuming tune that most of you won’t have a hard time warming up to. Maybe Childers’s gravelly accent will throw some of you for a loop, but I think his presence helps us place the song as something that might be played in a seaside bar with a special on PBR.

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4. “Born With A Broken Heart” – David Wax Museum

Blending Mexican music traditions with an American folk sensibility, David Wax et al craft hooky pop tunes with some unusual instrumentation. How exactly an accordion, a horn section, and some very-nearly-tribal-sounding drums all end up on the same track remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but I can only offer that the group pulls it off. The mad shuffle of this song should grab you from the opening seconds.

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5. “Voices” – Espers

Suggested to me by flatmate Josh—who hails from Kansas—Espers is an interesting find. Although several websites called their style of music “psychedelic folk” (maybe approaching certain aspects of Jefferson Airplane’s “Embryonic Journey” area?), I think that it might be better to place them alongside British folk heroes Fairport Convention. Although the styles of both bands have clear aesthetic differences, I think the attention paid to instrumental detail and the willingness to delve deep into a melody are highlighted in the work of both bands.

A main difference lies in the choice of Espers to investigate an almost more Baroque sound, incorporating a classical sensibility in terms of how the songs move, weaving in and out of separate melodic thoughts and introducing new ones in almost a suite-like format. Of course that’s not idiosyncratic in terms of the history of popular music, but the modern folk scene hasn’t exactly warmed to…how to put it?…a more scholarly, "trained" approach to music. This song and others by Espers are clearly the work of a real songsmith; someone behind the scenes understands which strings to pull to make these songs work the way that they do.