Defining moments on ‘The Private Sector’
Album review
LAST NIGHT I woke to the nearfull moon like a bright flashlight through my western window. “Hey, you!” she beckoned, relentlessly illuminating my squinting face. With a protesting sigh, I threw off my warm blankets and went outside to squat my full bladder to the dirt (#mesalife). I looked up at the pure shine and the few stars that could hold their own next to that big mama. The beauty humbled me. The stillness. The silence.
It seems to me that we always get a choice in life. We choose how we see. We shape meaning moment to moment. A midnight jolt-awake is either annoying or spectacular. Local Owen Johnson’s album, “The Private Sector,” released on Bandcamp on Nov. 11, feels like a funky-folky call to that balance between heaven and hell, and how we can mindfully tip the scale.
Starts off that way in full-on postAmericana (or as the artist’s site defines the genre — “posthole-diggercore”) thump and swing, Johnson’s cracklingdesert-air voice singing: “Fly away from me all you buzzards and crows / if I didn’t know better, I’d hit the shit on the nose.” Megan Wood softens the blow with a pretty layer of “oooo’s” while Shane Brown amps up the roar like a fast-paced little drummer boy. Robert Quijano is rooted on the bass. Later in the song, the demands become more self-directed: “I’m gonna stretch to the center of my sin / I’m gonna make amends to my mentors and my kin.” This reckoning a necessary step to sit at the door of paradise. To go from bitter to better.
“Locked in a Cell” is a slowed-down hum featuring Johnson on the banjo and banjola (combo banjo and mandolin). It begins in harmony: “I give thanks to this day to be free / to be some place that I like to be.” Gratitude is expressed despite life’s trapping confines — “courts like warts” (warts!), “inhospitable” hospitals, offices, bars, traffic and other tragedies in the negative reality. By the end of the song Johnson and Wood declare that, though there are all of these “sobering thoughts” — funny because the song’s push and pull makes me feel a little drunk — that they aren’t locked in the cell of it all.
There are pressures and setbacks and defeats in the album’s sixth and final song, “Other Times.” But, again, the choice appears. To feel good, or lose sleep. To see the “holy holy,” or be “irascible.” The song’s long instrumental riffs match Johnson’s presence with looking toward what’s to come. The harmonies continue on: “We commence / we take a chance / we hold each other’s loving gaze.”
Overall, the album (produced by Moonflower Sounds’s Peter Oviatt, whose mandolin swirls add to “Into Forever”) is a beautiful pair for a wideopen, sun-stained country road — somewhere like Highway 64W toward Tres Piedras, for example. It’s fast and slow. Serious, but funny (“Enemy Line” has many goofy play-on-words — “wondery pondery stick in the mud” and “you ain’t gonna egg my nog tonight”). And more than anything, it’s a reminder to keep steady in the unknown and to be conscious of how you choose to view the moonlight or whatever it may be.