“Writing this was brutally hard…”
Patterson Hood talks to Sylvie Simmons.
A second Truckers album in a row expressing anger at contemporary USA?
“From day one, our way of working was if we do one record one way, the next one we’ll do something very different. So our first inclination was to head in the other direction and do something much more personal. But right now, when it’s all breaking down around us, it’s hard to separate the personal from the political. There was another shooting today in California. A friend of mine’s daughter goes to that high school and knew at least one of the teenagers that was killed. And when people at shows are being shot at, you’ve got to believe that hits home.”
Why did it take three and a half years?
“A crazy lot has happened. Our last album really kept us on the road a long time. Also I moved across country, from Georgia to Oregon. And our kids are all at that age when they’re needing more from us than ever. But mostly it was figuring out how to take what it is we’re all living through right now and turn it into something worth listening to. Everything I would write was like, OK, I needed to get that off my chest but I never want to listen to that. Cooley and I write separately, and we have very different methods – he edits as he’s writing, and I don’t even think about if it’s good or not until it’s written – but for me this was brutally hard. Months on end of feeling terrible self-doubt – which I can certainly be prone to in other aspects of my life, but not so much with the writing process because I’ve been writing songs since I was eight years old, and it’s always come easy.”
What was the breakthrough?
“Writing 21st Century USA. I was walking to a restaurant to eat and I wrote the first half of it on a napkin at the restaurant, finished the whole song in the next hour, and I was, OK, I still know how to do this. It kind of showed me a way forward and led to me being able to write Thoughts And Prayers and Babies In Cages and some of that stuff. The writing was this dark horror. But ironically the making of the record was the opposite. We made it in one joyful week of intensely hard work.”
You recorded in Memphis?
“Cooley and I are from [nearby] Muscle Shoals, so we grew up having this kind of fetish about Memphis. In 1991 we were in the process of relocating our first band, Adam’s House Cat, to Memphis, but instead it broke us up. We’d planned to record American Band there but ended up in Nashville. So this time it was, OK, we’re going to finally make that Memphis album. We recorded in a very cool studio, Sam Phillips’ Recording Service – 18 songs in seven days, almost all live in the room. We had played just enough shows to where we were in road mode, but not burned-out road mode, just warmed up and ready. We hit it hard and worked crazy long hours, which I really like doing. Then we set about whittling this ungainly, oversized album to something more manageable.”
FOR A MAN who made his reputation alone, in a cabin, Justin Vernon has turned out to be quite the community activist. The appeal of his first record as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, was predicated on emotional and physical isolation: a solitary voice in the woods, far away from the madding indie crowd. Since then, though, Vernon has revealed himself to be the keenest of networkers, and a musician whose eye for a collaboration extends to other people’s business as well as his own. It was Vernon who encouraged the three members of Bonny Light Horseman into a self-effacing supergroup, of sorts, at festivals he curated with The National’s Aaron Dessner in 2018.
The band’s main attraction, ostensibly, is Anaïs Mitchell, who parlayed two decades of singer-songwriter graft into a Broadway musical, Hadestown, that won eight trophies at the Tony Awards last June. But Bonny Light Horseman is not, perhaps mercifully, the sort of project designed to capitalise on Mitchell’s new profile in theatreland. Instead, it gracefully doubles down on the most brittle iteration of indie-folk imaginable, Mitchell sharing responsibilities with Eric D
Johnson, frontman of the durable Fruit Bats, and Josh Kaufman, a guitarist and producer whose unostentatious virtuosity has augmented work by The National, The War On Drugs and Bob Weir.
Begun in August 2018 at Vernon and Dessner’s PEOPLE Festival in Berlin, and finished in a Woodstock studio last January, Bonny Light Horseman feels at once communal and hermetic. Rather than reflecting the interdisciplinary bustle of the festival, the 10 songs have a quietude and focus, even as various other performers from Vernon’s orbit drop in on the sessions. That focus is on a clutch of predominantly British and Irish folk songs, given new treatments – and in some cases new tunes – that emphasise both their timelessness and their useful mutability. So Bonny Light Horseman itself, a lament dating from the Napoleonic wars, manages to retain the song’s stark swagger, and the essence of its historic popularity in Ireland (Planxty’s 1979 version is a key antecedent), even as Mitchell’s offbeat way with the melody and the interventions of Mike Lewis on sax skew it towards a kind of ethereal jazz.
It’s one of those ideas that sounds convoluted on paper but works beautifully in practice, thanks to the group’s empathy – Mitchell and Johnson’s pinched, nasal voices are an especially odd but satisfying blend – and the clear shared purpose. Sometimes, Bonny Light Horseman more or less stick with the original tune and find other ways to innovate, so that the familiar plaint of Blackwaterside is rethought as a duet, Mitchell and Johnson trading lines over a wordless chorale from Lisa Hannigan and The Staves. The result might be radically different from, say, Anne Briggs’ take on the song, but there’s a palpable through line: a sense that the spirit of these ancient songs can be secured in the face of radical transformation.
The Roving, meanwhile, takes the lyrics of Loving Hannah (the Shirley & Dolly Collins version is a marvel) and rebuilds the melody, imbuing it with a gorgeous porch groove comparable to Hiss Golden Messenger, another band on Kaufman’s CV. Near the end, Justin Vernon himself arrives to lead the near-a cappella Appalachian gospel of Bright Morning Stars, his voice recorded with an untreated purity that he has rarely exposed in the 12 years since For Emma, Forever Ago. Like everything else here, Bright Morning Stars is a song with a long and complicated history; Kaufman first heard it on a bootleg by Jerry Garcia’s Acoustic Band. But as Sam Lee notes in this issue (see p52), traditional music is an ongoing conversation, not a museum subject. These great songs live on through reinvention; Bonny Light Horseman have done them proud.
IT HASN’T been easy. Wire’s illustrious history suffered two near-fatal punctures, in the early ’80s, then the entirety of the ’90s, and as reluctant frontman Colin Newman told MOJO last month, “We [still] have our moments – we are well able to test our internal relationships to destruction.”
Yet here they still are, compulsively exploring beyond the parameters of rock orthodoxy and their own past, and since 2008’s Object 47 becoming an exemplar of a mature group growing in productivity and excellence.
Their fourth long-player since 2015, Mind Hive manages to left-turn from any obvious continuity with 2017’s Silver/Lead, while upholding their own deft sonic identity. With a preponderance of synthesizers, it might be a distant cousin of 1990’s Manscape, but chiefly it’s experimental pop a-go-go, kicking off with a side of artfully sculpted bangers, then weirding out a tad (but not indigestibly so) on the flip.
Be Like Them opens with a classic Wire exercise in juxtaposition, as two counterpointed riffs – one plucked in a faintly Arabic style, the other crunching – provide a tense backdrop to Newman’s snipes about “cats getting fatter” and ‘”rabid dogs”.
Certain lyrics were penned this year by his bass-playing foil, Graham Lewis, AKA Wire’s chief lyricist (see grown-up lines like; “Insomnia taunts me in this tired year”), while others Lewis wrote circa 1978, for an unused track recently unearthed. The way the gnarly, staccato verses glide into the uneasy, gently descending chorus is the kind of thrill that late-period Wire routinely summon at will.
Their pedigree as post-punk tunesmiths nonpareil is omnipresent: Cactused mirrors latterday fuck-you ditties like One Of Us and Please Take by blending bile and melodic saccharine; with similar stealth, Off The Beach bounces in on a delectable indie-rock guitar mesh reminiscent of Felt, amid universal images of feeling at one with humanity on a happy day at the beach, only for that picture to darken – “CC cameras, knives and hammers/People sleeping, broken, beaten/People lying, homeless, dying” – and for the song to end abruptly, shockingly, without resolution.
Where Mind Hive diverges from its immediate predecessors is in a thread of synthy ambience that runs through the beatless, early Eno-esque Unrepentant, and the moodier Shadows, where sickeningly familiar snapshots of wartime euthanasia result in the usual inadequate response – “a minute of silence, made out of wood”. Like a sucker punch after those two, the Lewis-growled Oklahoma thunders out on a killer first line, “I admired your sexy hearse” – an outburst of inexplicable rage, duly followed by Hung’s eight-minute masterclass in shifting structure and aural texture.
Wire’s restless desire to leave different tracks in the sand is epitomised by closer Humming, whose original drums and guitar were totally expunged to leave another disquieting synthscape – lurid yet skilfully inconclusive music for these precarious times.