Silence and entropy
WITH FOLK MUSICIAN JACK LORANG
JACK LORANG laid on the porch of the painted blue A-frame in Sapello, New Mexico the midnight summer stars spinning overhead. He was warm in his sleeping bag after a chilly bout of night swimming in Storrie Lake with some musician friends. Crickets c hirped somewhere in the ponderosas. With Lorang’s head rested against a folded-up pair of pants he was using as a pillow, his mind rested on the future: the upcoming drive to California to help move his sweetheart to Taos; the small musical gathering to be held on this property later in the season.
COZY THERE, Lorang pictured playing his Hohner acoustic on the hillside plywood stage to the small crowd sprawled in the grass.
It was one of his favorite events and would be one of his only gigs during the pandemic when normally the singer-songwriter warbled his folk tunes all around town, making regular stops at the Sagebrush Inn. He imagined the bonfire smoke caught in the light of the stage and the light of the full moon. Then embers burning red and bright, a call to goodnight like a feeling Lorang has felt so many times. A dissipation.
Suddenly: lyrics. “We are standing on the edge of a long-forgotten bed of coals growing dimmer every time we turn around / I can feel the heat escaping from the ground.” Lorang scrambled for his phone and fold-up Bluetooth keyboard that fits in his bag or coat pocket. “I’m an engine of the entropy that animates my body,” he typed. Entropy. Lorang had to look the word up to remember what it meant, later becoming fascinated by the concept, soaking up quantum physicist Bryan Green’s book, “Until the End of Time,” about the history of the universe and its eventual decline into disorder.
“There’s a Buddhist mentality of being in the moment as it arises, as it exists and as it falls away. This song focuses on the falling away,” says the 38-year-old Illinois native who’s heavily influenced by storytelling-focused musicians like Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan.
FEBRUARY NOW and “The Long So Long” is still fresh in Lorang’s orbit. He records and re-records it in his at-home studio where a small table with the laptop Lorang mixes on sits in the room’s center.
“Sometimes I’ll do 10 takes in a row in a day and then forget about it and do the same thing again days later,” he says. “I probably have over 40 takes of this song.” One on electric guitar. One with more of a slowly-building introduction. One recorded with two microphones at the same time giving a kind of chorus effect. Another where Lorang’s voice breaks into a yodel. A take with a chaotic, psychedelic swell swallowing the song’s end. Lorang will copy the recordings onto a cassette and listen to them in his car to, as he says, “interrogate” them. What’s missing here? he asks, “are drums, bass, keys?” He wants the full sound and is hesitant to release the song on his Soundcloud or Bandcamp until he finds a band to back him.
Anytime the house is free of Zoom meetings or the roomies have left for the store, Lorang is in his studio, silence and stillness a major component of his process. When he first arrived in New Mexico 10 years ago, he spent the winter in solitude in Vallecitos, where he was the caretaker for a retreat center. In the cabins made of 100-year-old trees that beckoned to the creative writing major’s inner Thoreau/Emerson/Whitman, Lorang drank coffee, shoveled snow and read James Joyce aloud to himself in the best Irish accent he could muster. He’d get groceries delivered to him via snowmobile. He wrote melodies accompanied by his
Sherwood Deluxe jazz guitar from the ‘50s (which was later lost from the back of his pickup to the snow) and taped them on a Roland 8-track digital recorder. The solar system strong enough to power a simple recording set-up. “Winter time has always been my recording time,” he says.
In time, he landed alone in a doublewide up El Salto in Arroyo Seco, where he wrote some 22 songs, which he now has transcribed into “The Book,” a forest-green binder full of his typed-out lyrics and chords. “Adobe House” lives in the collection. It’s a song that cracks open with a harmonica, the electric guitar rolling like mesa sagebrush, soft but stiff. “Narrow Road to the Interior” is in there too, referencing an old Japanese poet, “knowing trees” and the best way to be free. Lorang just added his latest release, “Man Called Widow,” to the book. “It’s about colonialism and the legacy of conquering that my culture has to reckon with,” he says of the song with its Old West scenes and repeated lines and violence. When, last fall, three people lived in the trailer, Lorang would snag a squealer from the brewery and escape for a few hours to one of the río-side camp spots along 64 toward Angel Fire, roll some cigarettes and play under the orange leaves.
Lorang’s not sure what 2021’s orange leaves will bring. Working part-time at the Taos Center for the Arts, he knows more outdoor events are likely this summer. He misses playing shows, the way the music hides his shyness. Whatever life brings, Lorang will feel how one moment leaves so seamlessly for the next.