MUSICIAN FINDS HIS TEXAS HAPPY PLACE
Matthew Logan Vasquez writes wonderfully about place. The first time I heard his soulful voice was singing “Trashcan,” the first song on the first album by his San Diego band Delta Spirit, which was set on a subway platform, sort of the origin story of the band. The second Delta Spirit album was titled “History From Below,” an eye-level set of short stories in song, including “Ballad of Vitaly,” a sprawling epic tale involving a plane crash and a murder.
While Delta Spirit takes a breather, Vasquez relocated to the Texas Hill Country, where he grew up, and has been making solo records, including the new “Light’n Up.” It closes with a beautiful if aching song called “Oslo,” which again finds Vasquez writing evocatively about things going on in a specific place. In this case, it’s moving with his family from Wimberley to Norway to help care for his wife’s father, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“The sun sets so quickly here or does it even rise?” he sings. “The snow will melt then freeze again, turning me into ice. Well I came here for my family, but I think it’s time to go. Here I am in the city of Oslo.”
“It’s great here now,” Vasquez says, calling from Oslo. “The warmer months, the summertime, that’s the best. But in the winter, the sun goes down at 3:30, and it’s overcast and dark well before that. I’ve fallen victim to seasonal depression a few
times now.”
He rattles off a pros and cons list: Pros include inexpensive child care. Cons include sin taxes on “booze and cigarettes. That, plus groceries, are $400 a week. “I love my H-E-B, sir.”
That sense of disorientation — the cold, the depression — fed the songs, which in turn were pulled together by the album title, which Vasquez says is almost like a self-affirmation.
“It’s light and it’s not,” he says. “It’s an urging. It’s me talking to myself and the situations I found myself in when I was making the record. My family’s had quite a run for the past year-and-a-half, and because of that, there are some really sad moments on this record. And my personality is very much not like that. I’m an optimist. And I hope even the saddest of these songs have a little optimism in there. But it came from walking into this dark period. That’s what the record was for me. Facing that (expletive) head on.”
Throughout the album, Vasquez writes from the point of view of narrators itching to change the scenery. “Ghostwriters” finds grievance with the music industry in Nashville. “Vacation” runs a bit of humor through its discontent: “All the beautiful pleasures,” he sings, “we came here together. All this tropical weather is making me feel ill.”
As if to convince himself the album isn’t entirely about a fidgety feeling of being in the wrong place, Vasquez opens it with a sweet affirmation for his wife called “Ballad in Bed.” It has that old first-person quality found in some prominent tunes by Willie Nelson or Leon Russell.
“I felt like I wanted to dig in on that vibe and make it a conversation,” he says. “A conversation with my wife, which isn’t something I’d tried in a song before.”
Vasquez brings the songs and the album back to Texas for a few weeks, including a show Saturday at The Heights Theater.
And he’s excited to report that the family unit returns to Wimberley at the end of the summer.
“Face the bad times and walk through them,” he says. “But I’m excited to get back. I really belong in a warmer place.”