Music Notes

On this day in 1998, Lucinda Williams released Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, one of the greatest albums ever made. It was the cap on a wonderful early career. She was already middle-aged by this time, as her albums came out very, very slowly. A difficult, tempestuous person with a lot of relationship problems, she turned her hard living and incredible intelligence into a collection of jaw-dropping work. Today, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee is one of the finest artists working in music. Car Wheels is her favorite album. She has thoughts.

When I heard “Can’t Let Go” for the first time I didn’t know how to feel about it. I grew up in Alabama and in my early teens I was abruptly swept into punk. Country music was for my parents. A family friend, who was very excited about my sister Allison and my adolescent foray into music-making, made us each a mixtape of women songwriters he thought we might find inspiring. Lucinda’s “Can’t Let Go” was right in the middle of the sequence. I remember it confused and intrigued me.

At the time my taste in music was rigid and self-evident and without much depth. The fact that the genre wasn’t immediately recognizable kept me indecisive about it. The essence of Lucinda’s music really settles into that grayness. Her voice is gritty and lived-in but also so delicate. Her words are simple, her phrases are short but they fill you up juxtaposing truth and fable. She’s country but she’s blues but she’s alternative but she’s pop. All these contradictions that confused my underdeveloped music-loving mind are actually what make her so singular. It took me years to see that.

In this life of music fandom, we enthusiasts strive for the ultimate reward as a music-lover. This is, of course, finding the album that you can’t stop playing, the album that is the only source of relief in your day, the album that becomes your life. I’ve been blessed by this anomaly many times. When people say “That album changed my life” or “That album saved my life,” I believe this type of immersive enthusiasm is the phenomenon they’re referring to. It’s why music is so powerful; to me there is no other medium of art that one can return to so frequently or continue absorbing and engaging without getting burned out or bored. Sometimes, you find a record and it feels like you found your new best friend.

I’ve never experienced this type of infatuation with an album more than I have with Car Wheels. Truly, from the moment the first track “Right In Time” kicked in I just understood it. It felt like the cultivation of so many conflicting ideas, so many contradictions that swirled around inside my mind all pieced together with an effortless impeccability. I had been writing songs myself for about 10 years at that point and I’d always passively wrestled with my identity as an artist. I couldn’t fully step into my own agency. All of Lucinda’s contradictions, the genre-lessness, the grayness, those features always made me feel clumsy or self-conscious when I heard it in my own songwriting. It made me anxious.

Exploring all the corners of influence, making something authentic, letting it not take a discernible shape people can easily name, all of that took courage that I found hard to summon. When I discovered Car Wheels I fully realized how powerful it can be to embrace the contradictions and the unknown because that is the only path to making something that is truly original. I learned that from Lucinda.

There’s not much I can say about the album that others haven’t already said. It’s an A++, a genuinely perfect album that continues to blow me away two decades later.

What I can say however is that post-Car Wheels has been…not good. I guess it was fame that zapped and changed her. It happens. It happened to The Band for instance, who put out 2 of the best albums ever made, 1 pretty good one, and then a lot of mediocre to bad work. They were pretty open later about how fame changed them. I don’t know for sure if this is what happened to Lucinda. But while Essence is pretty good, most everything since has been kind of bad. I’ve tried to like her again. I gave West a listen. And the same with her recent Ghosts of Highway 20. But they just aren’t good. The lyrical quality has declined, the music has gotten really bloated (so many 6 minute songs with 2 minutes of pointless blues guitar), and somewhere along the way she started slurring her voice to the point that she now mumbles when she sings.

I guess it’s strange that someone’s career would drastically decline mid-career, but then it happens in film all the time. I was watching As Tears Go By last night and realized that Wong Kar-Wai made amazing film after amazing film from that, his 1988 debut, to 2004’s 2046. And then it’s been 14 years and he’s made 2 utterly forgettable films. Why? Same with John Sayles, who around 1999 just decided to make increasingly mediocre remakes of Lone Star moved to some other geographical location. Sometimes people just lose it. Alas, while I hope Lucinda has a late career comeback great album in her, I doubt it.

Oh hey, Joe Jackson died. Really one of the worst characters in American music history. His poor kids.

Moog tries to get its customers to fight the Trump tariffs. I think we can all agree we need our Moog products.

Rolling Stone lists the Top 100 songs of the 21st century. If it’s like every other list RS has ever produced, you probably want to avoid owning most of these songs.

Album Reviews:

Moses Sumney, Aromanticism

I was all prepared to like this. The idea is that Sumney takes soul music and works in modern lush arrangements and experimental ideas, working through the complexities of modern relationships, the truly inexhaustible topic. The kids love this, or at least the tastemakers do. But I didn’t get it. He sings so softly and in what feels like a sometimes affected way that I couldn’t find anything to hang my hat on here. It reminded me of how so much Pitchfork-approved artists get by on creating interesting sounds but who don’t actually have anything particularly interested to say in their music. I may be in the minority here, but I was utterly indifferent to this album.

C+

Snail Mail, Lush

Lindsey Jordan is an 18-year old kid from the Baltimore suburbs who just happens to be a very good songwriter and solid guitarist with a great indie rock sound. This is an extremely promising debut. Not sure she is breaking new ground here; this album is firmly within many long-established traditions of indie rock. But if you like those traditions, then Lush is well worth your time.

A-

Yo La Tengo, There’s a Riot Goin’ On

At first glance, borrowing Sly and the Family Stone’s title for an album this quiet and contemplative is howlingly absurd. There is certainly no riots on this album. But then it seems the band was going for music as a refuge for the actual riot goin’ on–that of our nation. In this, perhaps it succeeds. The band has always relied more heavily on instrumentals to drive their albums than most and that’s even more true here, with several long instrumental tracks. In between, there are several enjoyable songs and some that do trend toward the band’s occasional problem of the music fading so far into the background that it becomes forgettable. I am seeing them play live this fall for the first time and I am extremely curious how this translates into a live show.

B

Guided By Voices, How Do You Spell Heaven

How does one review a Guided By Voices album? They are pretty much all the same and there are so many of them. It’s loud and fun. The lyrics are basically meaningless. There are lots of short burst-songs. If you like GBV you will like this, if you don’t, you won’t. Just like nearly every other GBV album.

B+

Lal & Mike Waterson, Bright Phoebus

The British folk rock scene is one of the strangest scenes in the history of modern popular music. The rock part of it makes sense, more or less, and I understand why the British would look at the American folk traditions that were influencing rock and decided to use their own. But the American folk traditions were largely black folk traditions, which is where rock came from, whereas the British traditions were, uh, not. And so you had a wide variety of bands and projects of hugely varying quality and how they integrated that British folk music. Sandy Denny/Richard Thompson era Fairport Convention is the peak of the form and both took off in their own directions after they left the band. Jethro Tull on the other hand started as a rock band and then began incorporating those folk traditions by the mid-70s, including bringing some of those musicians such as Dave Mattacks into the band. Then you have bands that ended up pretty overwrought and only half listenable, like a lot of Pentangle albums. The traditions such as Martin Carthy are pretty enjoyable to me. Lal & Mike Waterson are part of the larger Waterson family, which is hugely influential. Norman Waterson married Martin Carthy; she didn’t release a solo album until the late 90s, but that self-titled album is fantastic, including a cover of Richard Thompson’s “God Loves a Drunk” that is significantly better than the original. Their daughter Eliza Carthy has moved the tradition into the 21st century, including some good pop/rock albums.

This 1972 album was one of the stranger albums in the canon and thus forgotten for many years. Its weird lyrics and rock background (RT is on guitar and Ashley Hutchings on bass) put in the middle of these traditions and didn’t quite hit in either camp and it only sold 1,000 copies at the time. Some of these sounds are basically shouting, others are psychedelic, others acoustic folk. It basically tries to be Sgt. Pepper for the fok-rock movement. Personally, I find Lal’s voice a bit annoying, which I think knocks it down just slightly in my book. Overall, I am still processing this recently re-released album. Fascinating, at the very least.

B+

TW Walsh, Fruitless Research

Going back to a 2016 album that I have wanted to listen to ever since, I was worried on the first song, which ran Walsh’s voice through a heavy electronic sound to make it nearly unintelligible in an 80s electronic way. But other than that song, I thought this was a really enjoyable electro-pop album with good catchy songs and a nice sound.

B+

Sami Baha, Free for All

Baha is a Turkish hip hop producer who now lives in London. This is a good reminder that the hip hop world is not one of American cities, but is in fact a truly global phenomenon, one of the United States’ great cultural impacts on the world. Baha imbibes that global vibe, not only because of where he was born and lives but because he brings in artists from around the world on this album. But overall, it reminds me too much of a lot of trip-hop DJ music and electronic albums of recent years in that it really stays way too much in the background. The flow is so mellow that I almost feel like I am in easy-listening land in a way that really doesn’t appeal to me much. This is perfectly acceptable and slightly interesting music, but I don’t find it more than that.

B

Oneohtrix Point Never, Age Of

I find this project always interesting, never quite compelling. Unlike a lot of electronic music, one is never bored listening to OPN. Yet I never quite love any of it. In this case, here’s another example of running vocals through 80s-style electronic distortion effects. Is this a thing in 2018 or I am just listening to the rare albums using this? Anyway, the new album from OPN is well worth a listen, at the very least.

B

Steve Reich, Four Organs/Phase Patterns

This release is one of my favorites by Reich. Yes, it is as repetitive as all his pieces, which is of course the point. But I found both Four Organs and especially Phase Pattersn incredibly compelling, drawing me into an intense world of mind-blowing proportions, a concentration I rarely achieve with anything, especially something that changes little, long a critique I have had of modern electronic music. But this is brilliant.

A

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and none things politics.