Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
McMurtry, Isbell ward off nostalgia
After a film screening the other morning, I was offering a few thoughts about the movie I’d just seen to a studio representative for him to put in the report he’d send back to the suits. (I try not to say anything in these debriefing sessions that will end up as a blurb on a DVD cover; so far I’ve been pretty successful.)
As I was talking to the rep, I became aware of a young man standing by and listening to us as I provided my instant analysis of the film. I brought up The Searchers and — showing off a bit —
Greed, Erich von Stroheim’s silent movie adaptation of Frank Norris’
McTeague. As I walked away, the young man beamed at me and said, not at all unkindly, “You know what you are? You’re a nostalgia critic!”
I hope he meant that in the way that I took it — that I tend to look at all works of art in the context of their tradition — but he just may have meant that I’m old. I got my electronic ballot for the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop music poll the other day and realized I’ve been voting in it for more than 20 years. I voted for De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising in 1989; I voted for Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville in 1993.
And those records still sound good to me; left to my own devices, I tend to return to music recorded decades ago. Not that I listen to the same music I listened to 20 years ago — these days I’m more likely to play John Coltrane or Dave Brubeck than to fire up the Rolling Stones. It’s not as if my tastes have calcified; I find I’ve become more catholic as I’ve gotten older. I can find something to like in a lot of contemporary artists, from Taylor Swift to Kanye West. I don’t pay much attention to the show-biz side of things — I don’t watch the Grammys, I don’t pay any attention to charts and I don’t listen to much terrestrial radio. Like most people I know, I find out about new music through word of mouth. But unlike most people I know, I do still get a couple of what we used to call albums proffered, usually via digital download.
So I feel under- qualified to offer a list of the best recordings of 2015. I only know what I’ve listened to these past months. And that listening doesn’t really respect adjectives like “new” or “old,” any more than it takes genre labels seriously. There were a couple of new albums that blew me away this year, but I’ve also been working my way back through the Wilco catalog to see what I’ve missed.
I’m totally taken with The Ties That Bind, which I think of as Bruce Springsteen’s deluxe version of The River, and I got a wonderful Bruce Cockburn boxed set — the nine-CD Rumours of Glory, which is meant as an audio companion to his autobiography of the same title.
If I could own only one excavatory Bob Dylan set I might just opt for the recently released The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12.
Most of the new music I heard this year was made long ago. My education in Miles Davis continues with Miles Davis at Newport: 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4, and I finally got to know Jackson C. Frank beyond “Blues Run the Game” and the other nine tracks
on his eponymous 1965 album (which was produced by Paul Simon and features Al Stewart on guitar and Art Garfunkel on backing vocals) through his Complete Recordings, a three-CD set that gathers together everything the luckless singer ever recorded.
And speaking of legendary tragic figures, the ghost of Karen Dalton, the lost voice of the ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene, was honored last year with the release of Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton, a project in which contemporary artists such as Sharon Van Etten, Marissa Nadler and Lucinda Williams were given Dalton’s lyrics to finish off as songs. While there’s always something a little ghoulish about these projects, this one strikes a nice balance between reverence for the source material and an artist’s need to make that material their own. Dalton is remembered less as a songwriter than as an interpreter, a kind of folk-blues Billie Holiday. This record won’t change that, but it does provide us with another entry point into a criminally forgotten figure.
But it’s the newer stuff you’re probably interested in, the best records of 2015. Well, maybe I can’t help you there, but here’s what I’m sorting through in preparation for filling out my Pazz & Jop ballot:
James McMurtry, Complicated Game (Complicated Game) — I’ve sometimes consigned McMurtry to a genre I think of as NPR Music (an admittedly dismissive rubric, though some of my favorite artists reside beneath it). He is a clever lyricist and a songwriter in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan tradition who is probably a little too sensitive to critical evaluations that focus on his literary facility while downplaying his musicality. Truth is, he’s a guitar player of ability, power and taste. This album is the best he has ever delivered, in part because of the production by C.C. Adcock, who supplemented and expanded
McMurtry’s country-rock sound with a New Orleans feel and instrumentation that includes Irish pipes.
A short-range singer who can express more with four notes than some can with four octaves, McMurtry has at times in the past come across as a taciturn, sorta prickly guy who’d be happy not to have to explain himself to fools. And it doesn’t help that every story about him has to include the facts of his biography — he’s the son of writer Larry McMurtry.
In today’s pop music environment, with sonic architecture mattering more than anything else, it’s possible to go for months without thinking much about anything, just sliding through the world like a shark, consuming mindlessly, feeling more or less the same about everything. You can even start to believe that it’s really all about your conditioning, the flavors you’ve grown used to and the tastes that you’ve acquired. It takes a little work to engage with new ideas, and you start to sympathize with your friends who’ve written off pop music as a playground around which it’s unseemly to be seen lurking after you turn a certain age: You can’t be 20 on Sugar Mountain.
Then you hear something like this and it knocks you about a bit. You feel something give within. And you need a moment to catch your
breath. And you believe all over again.
Jason Isbell, Something More Than Free (Southeastern) — This is an album about following through and showing up, of facing the quotidian horror of what Walker Percy called “everydayness.” It’s more muted, arguably as introspective as Isbell’s 2012 album Southeastern but more uplifting with, as the artist told Rolling Stone, “not as heavy a body count.”
And if Southeastern was all about breaking up with bad habits, this album’s all about process, about how to go about centering in the world while doing as little damage as possible to the soft beings around us. It sounds honest, the way that country music ought to, in that it considers the difficulties of ordinary people. It sounds warm, as though Isbell likes the sort of people he’s singing about.
It’s one of those albums you can live with for a long time, that you’ll be listening to decades from now, if you’re lucky enough to be listening to anything then. It’s the sort of album that makes
you hope so.
Those are my co-records of the year, but if I’ve got to make a list, I’d choose from these: Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty); John Moreland, High on Tulsa Heat (Old Omens); Kacey Musgraves, Pageant Material ( Mercury); Sleater- Kinney, No Cities to Love (Sub Pop); Justin Townes Earle, Absent Fathers ( Vagrant); Yelawolf, Love Story (Shady/ Interscope); Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear ( Sub Pop); Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Marathon Artists); Drake, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (Universal); Titus Andronicus, The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge); The Mountain Goats, Beat the Champ (Merge); Ryan Adams, 1989 (Pax Am).