Ry Cooder: “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down”
Toward the end of Ry Cooder’s latest LP there is a song about a handyman. The song is called “Simple Tools,” and it’s about a guy who can offer utilitarian solutions to basic problems. There’s nothing flashy about this fellow; he can spot problems and he can patch them up. His work may not be glamorous or innovative, his solutions not necessarily pretty to look at, but it’s what he does—he fixes things. And it might seem, at first, like an odd inclusion on what is otherwise an album overrun with political rage and moral outcry, but of course, the fix-it man is really a stand-in for Cooder himself. This is Cooder’s most timely and urgent release in many a moon, maybe ever—a long and unflinching album about socio-economic injustice, protest music for the Occupy era. It’s an album about war, poverty, and the culprits who look the other way while these things transpire.
They are not, in other words, simple problems, yet Cooder proves adept at addressing them using the simple tools in his songwriter’ toolkit—tools like humor and empathy, imagination and allusion. He is under no delusion that he can fix the world’s problems, but his songs serve a practical and positive purpose. They direct our attention to the gravity of what’s going on, and they suggest different avenues for us to respond. These avenues include righteous indignation and deep compassion. They include getting pissed one moment, laughing out asses off the next. They are not permanent fixes, but neither are they cosmetic ones. Cooder’s simple tools, as laid out on this album, are invaluable.
The first tool out of the box is the album’s very title: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down reads like an old soft-shoe joke from the Depression era, and it makes it puts this thing into perspective—history is cyclical, injustice a thread that runs throughout it. But you don’t need the scattered references to modernity to know that Cooder’s rage resides in the present. Truthfully, Pull Up Some Dust is the angriest set of protest music yet composed for this present generation’s crisis, and one of the most elegant and expansive; it belongs on the shelf with Elvis Costello’s National Ransom, a travelogue from a country that’s lost its way and lefts its people feeling like kilted lovers.
The album refracts the times in fourteen different ways; it’s as though Cooder is offering different perspectives because he knows that at least one of them is bound to get you riled up. Just about all of them are successful in doing that, but the standpoint might be a song called “John Lee Hooker for President,” a song about exactly what it sounds like. It’s astonishing, and not just for Cooder’s note-perfect impersonation for the bluesman as he contemplates a bid for the White House; no, it transcends any gimmickry with its white-hot political rage and its suggestion of a world less concerned with making war than playing the blues. Cooder’s Hooker isn’t reluctant to throw the Democrats out on the street, but saves more bile for the Republicans. The song is hysterical and venomous. Cooder/Hooker pledges that his administration would leave everything copastatic, and we believe him.
At times Cooder is almost merciless in his portrayal of “the enemy.” “I Want My Crown” is a scorcher, with the singer growling over an eleven-piece band and embodying greed and injustice as forms of pure evil. “Lord Tell Me Why” is a little more nuanced, but utterly amazing; it rocks to a killer, almost hip-hop groove and features a gospel choir, with Cooder’s protagonist wondering why “a white man ain’t worth nothing in this world no more.” The song is pained and uncomfortable, but it doesn’t just incur our judgment. The man singing is obviously confused and bewildered by the modern world, and likely the recipient of some injustice himself. We feel for him. I think Cooder does too, especially if the closing number, “No Hard Feelings”—a Native American’s litany of sins against the environment and his people, that ends, astoundingly in forgiveness—is to be believed.
These are songs for igniting our indignation; the prevailing notion is that injustice matters, and we shouldn’t stand for it. But the album is also about expanding our moral imagination. There are songs here that reveal how high the stakes—like “Baby Joined the Army,” a mesmerizing, slow-burning blues scorcher, nearly seven minutes of just Cooder and his guitar. It’s a father’s lament for a daughter who joined the army and got herself shot to pieces—all because she needed the money. It’s a heartbreaker, and its humanity grounds other songs, like “Christmas Time This Year”—a raging and grotesque anti-war song that again reminds us of the human cost of reckless nations, only this time it’s dressed up as an innocuous Mexican polka, a holiday sugar rush for a ruthless and cruel world.
It is easy to become angry while listening to these songs, but difficult to become dispirited; there is too much empathy, too much humor, and too much excellence. Indeed, Cooder is reaching deeper than ever into his songwriter’s toolbox and finding simple tools we haven’t heard him use lately, or ever. This means the album is almost completely devoid of his usual guitar heroics, but it’s meant to be a songwriter’s showcase, and on that level it is nearly flawless. He reveals his resourcefulness and imagination time and time again, opening the album with a war-time march that’s just mandola, drums, and Vonnegut-level satire (“No Banker Left Behind”), then following it with a weepy Tex-Mex piece that takes on the bankers from a different perspective—namely, that of outlaw Jesse James, looking down from Heaven in abject horror. His rage becomes our own.
Vince Gill: “Guitar Slinger”
How do you follow a four-disc collection of brand new material, an extravagantly forward-thinking and generous collection that reframed the entire notion of what contemporary country music could be while remaining steeped in its history and lore? If you’re Vince Gill, the answer, it seems, is to do it all over again—only this time, contain in to just a dozen songs. Gill’s new Guitar Slinger comes five years after These Days; can you blame him for taking some time off? The new recording is, obviously, a more compact set than the 53-song beast that came before it, but its brevity makes it no less expansive. The album touches on everything These Days did and more. With every album Gill releases, it seems the boundaries of what constitutes modern country music are pushed further and further back, and Guitar Slinger encompasses an entire spectrum of popular song that very few recording artists, of any genre, could wrap their head around.
In some ways, it packs an even greater punch than These Days. That album, you’ll remember, was sectioned off according to genre—there was a disc for rock, a disc for smooth ballads, a disc for classic c&w, and a disc for bluegrass. Those different modes intermingle on Guitar Slinger, caressing each other and spilling into each other in a way that makes it hard to draw strict distinctions; sometimes you can point to a certain song and say it would have fit well on the Ballads disc, or on the Bluegrass one, but not always. Gill obviously isn’t mining these idioms for as much depth, but he is finding new variations, and ultimately expanding his music even further. There are songs on Guitar Slinger that wouldn’t have fit very easily onto any of These Days’ discs.
Really, it takes a couple of songs before you come to anything that’s even recognizable as country. The title track opens the album, and if it’s got a little twang to it, it’s more in a Sun Studios sense than anything else. It’s an uproarious 50’s-style rock and roll number that tips its hat to Gene Vincent’s guitar licks and Jerry Lewis’ pounding piano in equal measure. Yes, it’s got some pretty stellar guitar heroics; it takes a certain size of cajones to title an album Guitar Slinger, but Gill’s got the slash-and-burn to earn the title. But the shredding isn’t as big a part of the album as the title might lead you to believe; this is a songwriter’s showcase, something the title song makes evident with its autobiographical narrative and winking humor (he went and married him a contemporary Christian singer, the song reminds us). The song that follows is a complete 180 from the first—“Tell Me Fool” is a blue-eyed soul ballad that’s smooth and soulful, and a kick-in-the-ass to any would-be cheater—but here again, it doesn’t sound like anything you’d hear on country radio.
What makes the album great is simply how professional Gill is; both as a songwriter and a record-maker, he is a consummate craftsman, and while that may not sound exciting on paper it leads to music that’s rooted in history but not restricted by it, music with a real sense of curiosity at all that pop songs can be but never seems show-offy in its execution. It also leads to some moments that really ought not work, but do, brilliantly. The third song, and first single, is called “Threaten Me with Heaven.” It’s sung from the perspective of a man facing down mortality; he consoles his wife by saying the wonderful life they’ve had together can never be taken away, and death is only the beginning of life eternal. It’s a straight-up tearjerker, its harmony-rich refrain almost shameless, but it works like gangbusters. You can’t not be moved by it.
I have a hard time imagining “The Old Lucky Diamond Hotel” on any of the four These Days discs. In fact, Gill says it was this song that really kickstarted this album, assuring him that he was able to write material that didn’t simply rehash something from the last one. It’s a story-song, recounting the colorful patrons of the titular hotel. It’s pretty country, but too old-timey to fit on the last album’s c&w disc. I’d say the same about the mountain gospel song “Bread and Water,” or the eerie “Billy Paul,” a tale of murder and suicide belied by its rather upbeat arrangement.
Two of the best songs come at the end. “If I Die” is a light Texas swing, and one of several songs here that deals with mortality. Its lyric reveals just how good Gill is at crafting songs that fit within country parameters while exposing just what a difference a smart writer makes; the way he fills in the details of the song with what I assume to be part autobiography, part fiction, and part philosophical musing, then bringing it all back around to a matter of faith, is stirring. And “Buttermilk John” is a kind of mountain music coda—but it’s stretched to six minutes in length to give the musicianship room to sparkle. All told, Guitar Slinger is an album built on songs but ultimately bigger than the sum of its parts; it shows us how a little imagination and out-of-the-box thinking can cause contemporary country music to really sing, and proves again that Vince Gill does this better than anyone else.
Film Break: “The Three Musketeers”
File this one under Morbid Curiosities, I suppose, but my review of the new Three Musketeers movie is posted at CT. You can pretty much determine how silly (and loosely adapted) this one is just from the trailer, but I will say that it has its moments of fun, despite an overall poor execution.
Tom Waits: “Bad as Me”
The first thing that struck me about it was the length. Bad as Me is the first collection of new material from Tom Waits in seven years; my copy, despite being the “deluxe” edition with three songs not on the album proper, is just over 50 minutes in duration. This follows on the heels of Orphans, a sprawling box set that filled every nook and cranny of it three discs, and Real Gone, a monumental album that felt just as expansive despite fitting onto a single CD. Seven years and you’ve got less than an hour of music to show for it, Tom? Say it isn’t so.
But actually, the brevity of this project is very much to the point of its charm, and to what makes it stand out as another weird and essential entry in the Waits catalog. I have long revered albums like Rain Dogs and Mule Variations for their sense of excess; Waits’ indulgence, on everything he’s recorded this side of Saturday Night, is part of what makes him great. But Bad as Me is his first album in a long while that never tempts you to press the skip button. Every note feels like it matters, and besides, there is a kinetic energy to this one that makes it next to impossible to turn off midstream. It is, in the most subtle yet substantive of ways, a new kind of Tom Waits album, and I love it for that.
The songs are all short and lean, but more importantly, they are warm and rich and deep. This is an inviting record; where Waits albums often receive comparisons to German art-song, or to Captain Beefheart, I’ve seen several critics invoke named like Ray Charles with this one. As well they should: This is a Tom Waits pop album, pure and simple. In some ways, it re-invents R&B in his image, just as Mule Variations did the blues—only here, all the excess is trimmed away and what we are left with is an album as nervy and as vital as any he has mustered.
The music is so urgent, in fact, that it seems to have started before the record even starts playing. The opening number, “Chicago,” comes out of the speakers like it’s already in progress, a locomotive banjo figure from Waits imitating the sound of a runaway train. Waits’ narrator jumps aboard, fleeing to a new town, a fresh start, perhaps even a different name; he hopes things will be better in Chicago, but his problem is one that a change of scenery can’t fix. The characters in these songs are all migrants and malcontents, but the problem is in their own soul, it seems. No midnight train is going to fix that.
That song introduces a kind of frayed energy that never flags, even on the slower numbers. There are a lot of upbeat songs here, including the sweaty R&B of “Get Lost”—its title a pun that works on several levels, and would have made a find alternative title to the entire LP—and “Raised Right Man,” which combines organ and gospel wailing into a straight-up garage banger. There is also a lot of Keith Richards on this record, which seems very relevant to the raucous energy of the thing. He plays guitar all over, duets on the song “Last Leaf,” and is mentioned by name on “Satisfied,” Waits’ uproarious rejoinder to a certain song from “Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards.” That he would namedrop his own session guitarist is as good an indicator as any of the pure joy of this recording. Waits and his players are simply delighting in playing together.
Bad As Me is an album that seems, at first, to be more of a consolidation of Waits’ strengths than a breaking of new ground, but the album is deceptive in that way; he smuggles in his sense of adventure here, burying new sounds within familiar forms. The title song is a good example: It sounds at first like “Big in Japan” channeled through Bone Machine clatter, but its high-stepping refrain and rich percussion track gradually set it apart as its own kind of monster. Indeed, for as lean and to-the-point as these songs are, the arrangements are rich and bold; you’d probably opt for this kind of depth, too, if you had Marc Ribot, Charlie Musselwhite, and Dave Hidalgo as part of your studio team. I think you hear it best on the ballads; “Back in the Crowd” is a sort of mariachi-flavored number, and “Talking at the Same Time” masks all kinds of horns, ambient noise and studio clatter. The sophistication of the arrangements never gets in the way of the sheer visceral thrill of the songwriting, nor of Waits’ robust performances. (The spittle and stutter of Real Gone is really gone, but he continues to mine his own voice for new characters and personas, particularly in the higher register.)
For all its familiar touchstones, there is real boldness here, not just in the gleeful performances but in the writing. How else could one possibly take “Hell Broke Luce,” a maniacal and profane soundscape that immediately takes the award for most hellish thing Waits has ever recorded, and appropriately so; it might be the angriest and most pointed anti-war song in a decade. The closer, “New Years Eve,” is a bold in a different way, audaciously pilfering “Auld Lang Syne” for its chorus in a way that links it, as my colleague Thom Jurek noted, to the proud Waitsian tradition of “Tom Traubert’s Blues” and its “Waltzing Matilda” refrain.
Waits digs deep into familiar themes here, but the concision of the songs puts it in league with Bone Machine and Blood Money as one of his most conceptually focused records. I have seen some reviews say that all the songs are love songs; others, that the LP is obsessed with death. Both are right, I think, but I’d pan the camera back and say that, really, it’s an album about human need and desire, intrinsically linked with human frailty and depravity. Waits tweaks his vagabond persona to profound effect: If the album begins with a great migration and finds its mantra in “Get Lost,” its heart seems to lie in the loner’s lament of “Back in the Crowd,” the entertainer’s confession in “Pay Me (“they pay me not to come home”), and the illicit love song “Kiss Me” (“kiss me like a stranger”). Meanwhile, “Last Leaf” a duet with Richards, could be taken as an ode to mortality or an affirmation of Waits’ own showbiz longevity. He swears it’s just a song about a leaf on a tree.
Peter Gabriel: “New Blood”
New Blood is the second Peter Gabriel in as many years, and, in execution, it follows an exceedingly similar template to the album that came before it. Given that this is a man notorious for taking as many as ten years between albums– and going to painstaking lengths to ensure that each release has a very distinct character from the one that preceded it– that has to mean something. Some critics have regarded the rapid advent of New Blood as some sort of response to the fact that the Scratch My Back ran out of steam; Gabriel’s collection of cover songs was meant to be followed with an anthology of other artists covering his songs, but that never panned out, so he’s taken it upon himself to cover his classic material. But I think the rapid succession of albums can be explained much more simply: He’s just on a roll. Scratch My Back sounded like a veteran artist rediscovering his delight in recording music, and New Blood continues that exploratory tone. Together, these albums represent the best pop-oriented albums Gabriel has made since So.
But of course, the singer’s desire for each project to stand on its own hasn’t abandoned him, so it should come as no surprise that, if New Blood trades in many of the same conceptual tropes as Scratch My Back– both albums offer us drumless, guitarless recreations of older songs– its character is fundamentally very different. Scratch My Back reminded me of something I’d always known about Peter Gabriel, but had long forgotten– that is, that he knows his way around a pop song. (How could I forget such a thing about the man who gave us “Sledgehammer,” you ask? Well, twenty years of OVO and Up will have that effect.) The album made a solid case for Gabriel as one of rock’s most soulful singers, and a discerning interpreter of pop songs old and new.
There is nothing on New Blood that I would call a pop song, really– save for “Solsbury Hill,” which is tacked on as a bonus. You might make the case for something like “Don’t Give Up,” but it stretches close to seven minutes and features ethereal, art-ravaged singing from Ane Brun, which means that, like everything else here, it seems designed to implement the orchestra in a way that reminds us of Gabriel’s long-standing art-rock cred. And indeed, if the last album nodded to his love of concise songcraft, this album betrays his love for stretching things out into jagged and sometimes circuital arrangements. It has more to do with trilogy of self-titled albums, his Genesis work, or yes, even his instrumental soundtracks than it does “Sledgehammer” or “Steam,” neither of which are present here.
The initial impact of this project, then, is a little less pleasing to me than Scratch My Back. That album was warm and welcoming; this one at first seems cold and distant, maybe even– God help us– pretentious. But once I found my way amidst these odd sonic structures, some of which hold only a slight resemblance to the original recordings, I realized that the merits of New Blood are not to be denied. Once again, Gabriel is turning to orchestral music for fresh inspiration, and rather than sound like a glorified legacy package or quasi-”greatest hits” assortment, this music has the rush of new discovery and open horizons. His own self-imposed limitations have forced Gabriel to re-imagine his own canon in ways that are strange and surprising, and pretty much uniformly wonderful.
Whether any of them could ever surpass the original recordings, of course, will be a matter of contention. I will throw my lot behind the new versions of “San Jacinto” and “The Rhythm of the Heat,” though. These are among the most rhythmic compositions this beat-centered songwriter ever penned, and the sheer audacity of re-imagining them in this setting is staggering. But what really amazes is how Gabriel and arranger John Metcalfe really dig into all the colors of the orchestra to come up with dynamic and hypnotic arrangements that make them feel full and complete– like this is how they were meant to be performed. I also love the new “Red Rain,” which renders the apocalyptic storm of the original in even bolder, more vivid colors.
Appropriately, the selections trend toward Gabriel’s more dramatic, art-centric songs– a moving “Wallflower,” deliriously creepy “Intruder,” and shimmering “Mercy Street” are also highlights. At times the arrangements sound like they were conceived by a film composer. That he throws in a block of So songs might seem at first to be at odds with the nature of this project, but “Red Rain,” “Mercy Street,” and “Don’t Give Up” all fit the trappings of this project well. “In Your Eyes,” meanwhile, might be one of the toughest re-imaginings to swallow, if only because that song is so widely loved and because this version doesn’t just radicalize the arrangement, but the very melody. Most exciting of all might be the previously blase or forgotten songs that Gabriel utterly redeems here: “Downside Up” is just a joy, and “Darkness,” one of the few memorable tracks from Up, benefits from a more organic arrangement, one that more precisely highlights the song’s schizophrenic nature.
Put the two albums together in a box set and you could call it one of Gabriel’s finest hours; as stand-alone projects, both offer considerable charms and ample reward for attentive listeners. As for New Blood specifically, I’ll say only that Gabriel isn’t just looking to his past here. There is no inertia, no nostalgia coloring this disc. This is an album with its eyes cast toward the future, and they give me hope that this arc in Gabriel’s story is just beginning.
My Brightest Diamond: “All Things Will Unwind”
My review of the new album from My Brightest Diamond– which is perhaps a bit too precious for my sake, but has plenty of moments of inspired whimsy– is up at CT.
Aaron Strumpel: “Birds”
A bit late in posting this one, I’m sorry to day, but don’t let that give you the indication that I have anything but enthusiasm for this very fine album; I was a fan of Strumpel’s Elephants and this one is even wilder, even more raw and raucous, yet still so intimate, so tuneful, and so deft. My review is posted at CT. Don’t let the album pass you by.
Film Break: “The Ides of March”
A rare interlude for film this morning– and a mighty good one, at that. George Clooney’s The Ides of March is riveting, and surprisingly cynical. A very strong recommendation here, but perhaps not for those who who prefer to cling to some sort of political idealism.
Joe Henry: “Reverie”
A Joe Henry album, I have come to believe, is more than a little like a case in HBO’s The Wire; as Detective Freamon might remind us, “All the pieces matter.” The new one has fourteen pieces, and I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that any one of them is more or less important than all the others. Each seems to present the maps and legends needed to explore the surrounding territories. But a song that has been revealing itself, little by little, as a particularly well-hidden gateway to Reverie’s secrets is “Grand Street.” The song recalls, perhaps deliberately, another of Henry’s songs, “This Afternoon,” from the Tiny Voices album. Both songs are masterpieces of suspense; ominous details pile up and suggest a story that never arrives, as if Henry is suggesting that the build-up is more important than the event itself. In “Grand Street,” there is maybe even less of a narrative than in “This Afternoon.” Our narrator stands atop a stair. He scratches his leg, has a smoke, takes in the scene. There’s a butcher, and a woman with a scarf in her hair, but really, nothing much happens. The song itself is a holy act of waiting. It is a moment and nothing more.
That makes it, I reckon, a song only Joe Henry would write, perhaps even a song only Joe Henry could write. It also makes for an evocative portrait of Reverie in miniature. If the album was a movie, this song could be the trailer. “Grand Street” surveys time not as a philosophical construct or as a tool of measurement, but as a physical entity, a force that gives the song a structure and a context.
The album both is and isn’t about time. Joe Henry has as much as said that time is its central conceit—something that is not, he bids us remember, related to the fact that he turned 50 while writing these songs—but to suggest that the man sat down and whittled away at fourteen songs that muse, in abstract terms, on time as a concept would be like saying that Henry’s Civilians was engineered to be a dozen songs “about” God and politics. On that album, the twin forces of the nation and the divine shaped and propelled the action, but were not its central players. The characters in those songs did not sit and talk about God and country, and neither do the characters in these songs offer conjecture about the invisible hand of time. Time is like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, in a sense; it propels the action and sets the tone while remaining largely unseen. And when it makes a real appearance—say, on “Room at Arles,” a song for the late Vic Chesnutt—it’s fairly dramatic, though not in the way you might think.
There is another sense in which Reverie is an entirely different record than Civilians. Both Civilians and Blood from Stars were, to some degree, meditations on Mystery. Reverie doesn’t consider mystery so much as it embodies it, much as Tiny Voices did. To put it another way, I think you can listen to Civilians from the first song to the last and assume a consistent narrator, or at least a reliable authorial voice. And Blood from Stars, with its prelude and prologue, had a deliberate structure to it. Reverie is more of an abstraction, more a set of thematically-linked short stories than a Great American Novel, a set of fragments that suggest a shape you can almost see, even if you can never quite arrange the pieces in a way that makes that shape fully evident. And again I tell you: All the pieces matter. (By the way, I don’t for a moment believe Henry didn’t intend for this thing to have a funny shape and a slanted vision; he cites Picasso as an inspiration for this album, for goodness sake.)
And about that funny shape… let me return, if I may, to “Grand Street,” a song that serves as both summary and sleight of hand, a bit of misdirection that threw me off for a good several weeks of listening before the bigger picture began to enter my view. Reverie is two albums in one; as has already been said rather emphatically, this is very much the closest thing we have to a Joe Henry rock and roll album, a set of strangely bumping and thrashing basement tapes that have a greater sense of improvisation to them, a more visceral impact, than anything he’s done. “Grand Street” builds, with live-in-the-studio immediacy, into a tempestuous middle section that did not, as far as I know, cause structural damage to the basement in which it was recorded, but sounds like it could quite easily have knocked some things loose. It, along with “Sticks and Stones” and “Strung” and the lead single-ish “Odetta,” set up the album as a rowdy and rambunctious affair, which it frequently is, but it is not Joe Henry’s rock album or his Basement Tapes any more than Blood was his blues album or Scar his jazz one.
Instead: It’s a slippery and elusive and impressionistic thing with many pieces—and all the pieces matter! It is an rich assortment of riddles, scenes left slightly askew. The first half of the album is where all those basement tape whispers come out: It’s where you’ll find all the songs mentioned above, all the strange bumps and rattles of Henry’s volatile basement combo. It’s got rock, blues, country, tango, and a gangbusters Money Jungle opener where small-band chemistry conveys music with real physicality. The songs—“Grand Street” being one of them—are like little movie scenes snatched from the reels and refashioned into a new film; they don’t have the same stories or the same characters, but in an undeniable way they were clearly made to go together.
After “Strung,” a tango that tips its fedora to Tom Waits in full-on circus carny mode, the ground shifts and the record starts to take on a different kind of character; what follows are four ballads, the songs less like movie scenes than stand-alone poems, the structures clearer but no less mysterious. These songs are sparer, too, but no less physical—the small-ensemble intimacy makes them ballads you can feel on your skin.
The end of the album is the most surprising of all, at least for those of us who have been listening to Joe Henry albums for a while now. The final three songs are, for want of a better cliché, pop songs. And love songs—because how else would one end an album that frequently pokes its finger into the eye of time, but never once takes its ravages to be anything but inevitable?
My grouping of the songs according to what their forms seem to dictate betrays a loose and imperfect method of classification, if only because the third and possibly best song on the album, “After the War,” could fit quite easily into any of the three sections. As a sort of pre-war ballad—pop the way Bing Crosby did it—it makes for a vivid entry in the first half of the album’s stylistic shuffle; of course, it is also both a ballad and, arguably, a love song, even if its sentiment is one borne of regret.
“After the War” also illustrates the way Reverie tends to allow its mysteries to abide without need of classification. It is a song that surveys time, yes—calls it by name, even—but the crux of the song is really in that word after. The song isn’t about time in the abstract so much as time as a physically imposing presence, a fence between a then and a now. It’s also about the narrator’s pining for what lies on the other side of that fence. That tension is, basically, the story and substance of the song, and indeed, of the entire record; “Odetta” works in a similar way, only this time the narrator wants to be carried ahead instead of allowed to walk back.
Of the ballads section of the album (and once again I am cheating a bit; “Deathbed Version” might be too slinky and cantankerous to fit the bill), the most pivotal number might be “Tomorrow is October,” a song with a declarative sentence as its title and as the full force of its revelation: The narrator, in the verses, struggles to find his footing as the ground beneath him ever moved, but then the chorus hits with the full gravity of something inevitable. The songs in this section have better manners, and seem to come from a more refined and sophisticated stock, than the ones that came prior—“Deathbed Version” is a variation on an e.e. cummings conceit, and “Room at Arles” takes its name from a painting—but their truths may in fact be all the more savage because of it. Certainly, “Deathbed Version,” where the present moment collides with mortality, is the most sinister-sounding thing Henry has ever put on an album.
As for the finale: Who knew Joe Henry wrote songs like this? “Unspeakable” is a lover’s hymn that uses song itself as its central metaphor of love’s power when it is something active, not merely assumed; in so doing it hearkens back to “Strung,” which likens the action of love to the action of creating, and to “Room at Arles,” which measures life in terms of song. Time’s savagery is not denied, but rather it is accepted, which seems to be the overriding idea of the closing song, “The World and All I Know.” Lofty title aside, this is a very different sort of album closer for Joe Henry; it’s not an epic like “Your Side of My World,” nor does it tie the record’s themes together as neatly as “God Only Knows” or “Light No Lamp” did, but rather it serves as a sort of final thought, a last scene, a closing perspective that plays off everything that came before it and suggests the notion of surrender as a sort of antidote to the more menacing sense of inevitability in, say, “Tomorrow is October” or “Deathbed Version”—and for that matter, an answer to the narrator’s anxieties in “After the War.” And all that in a concise three minutes; I told you it was a pop song!
But it’s not a pat answer so much as a tranquil distillation of a motif that surfaces throughout the album, more violently and with greater urgency. That’s the motif of the search, an active and sometimes fumbling but no less determined quest for meaning in the here and now—intimacy in the face of death’s cruelty, love and faithfulness even when tomorrow and forever are empty promises. In “The World and All I Know,” that kind of surrender to time’s undertow suggests that impermanence need not mean meaninglessness. Its contrast is in the album opener, “Heaven’s Escape,” an expression of innate dissatisfaction and restlessness even in paradise—of a human heart that cannot be satisfied so long as time keeps marching forward. And then there is “Eyes Out for You,” where the singer searches for an unnamed lover, through eyes “each blue and black.”
What Henry has done here, it should be said, is a rather remarkable achievement; he’s taken time’s passage as a sort of unifying force that can, and does, smuggle in necessary themes of personal stock-taking without ever being a confessional album—or, God forbid, an autobiographical one. They are songs about love as a verb and time as an immovable force, and thus they are songs about living in the balance. “Sticks and Stones” might be the most obvious example—though it ends with a frozen-in-time scene not unlike “Grand Street,” its chorus is concerned with new leaves, presumably the kinds one might turn over, only here they have all run out. “Dark Tears,” meanwhile, calls for an acknowledgement of how urgent all this really is; “some take love for granted, like they’ll never be alone” goes its most emphatic verse, which comes, I should note, right before a verse about remembering the dead.
Reverie is an elliptical record, built on the frayed connections between Henry’s sketchiest songs to date—which is not in any way a bad thing. There is nothing here that takes the role of the magnificent centerpiece, as “Our Song” did on Civilians, building from hypnotic narrative into a chorus that connects the dots and lifts the curtain on the song’s implicit revelations; nor is there anything that leans in the direction of historic iconography as an easy signpost, no narration from Richard Pryor or Charlie Parker. (Those attentive to the liner notes will witness a fleeting glimpse of Henry Fonda’s likeness, however.) These songs are cut closer to the bone. They entice rather than explain. They conjure mystery and permit us to savor its presence.
What this isn’t is a willfully difficult record. This is one of the true pleasures of any Joe Henry album, and one of his greatest gifts as a record-maker: His work always welcomes us to spend time with it, then amply rewards us for doing so. Reverie wears its fraying edges with warmth, its delights palpable. A song like “Tomorrow is October” is well within Henry’s wheelhouse, and he does ballads like this one so assuredly that it’s easy to take for granted the fact that he does them expertly. “Room at Arles,” meanwhile, is noteworthy for being the first recording featuring just Joe and his guitar; though simple in execution, it’s as scruffy and disheveled as anything here. Meanwhile, “Dark Tears” is all circular rhythms, almost a drone; it’s a new color in Henry’s palette, as is “Heaven’s Escape,” a ramshackle number that harnesses the loose electricity of small-combo jazz recordings more evocatively than anything he’s recorded before. Most surprising of all is the wild abandon of the drum solo that comes in the middle of “Sticks and Stones.” Joe Henry albums never feel fussed over, but here he’s ruffling his hair more than ever, and it allows Reverie to be the unkempt, roguish charmer in the Joe Henry catalog.
It might go without saying, I suppose, that basement racket turns out to be the perfect mode of expression for this particular set of songs. Henry and his band wrestle with something wild and wooly here, and they impose some order on it without quite taming or subduing it, and they don’t create beauty from the savagery so much as point to the beauty that’s already there. Reverie is an album that teaches you how to listen to it, and that’s how I’m hearing it now: As a series of moments in time that whisper of big pictures and unspeakable revelations.
