Joseph O’Connell is a folklorist from Bloomington, Indiana, a man who spends his days documenting the local culture of the Midwest. When not occupied with ethnography, he also makes a distinctive brand of folk music under the moniker Elephant Micah. O’Connell has recently released Where in Our Woods, his twelfth album (for those interested, you can check out his back-catalogue via Bandcamp).
O’Connell takes a decidedly minimal approach to folk rock, building songs from the bare essentials without a single superfluous note or instrument. On Where in Our Woods he uses just a guitar and an antique pump organ to craft the majority of his songs, backed by the sparse drums of his brother Matthew, and the odd flourish of baritone ukulele and toy recorder. He has also recruited a pretty impressive backing singer – none other than Will Oldham (credited as Bonnie Prince Billy). Oldham is a good reference point for the style of the album too, and if you throw in the minimalism of (pre-Father John Misty) J. Tillman and the quiet psych weirdness of Califone you’re close to getting a handle on things. The lyrics are fragmentary and vague but pregnant with meaning, lending heavily from O’Connell’s day-job to paint a bizarre version of American life. The songs are populated with a peculiar cast of characters, from redneck mystics and meth-cooking couples to an ominous colony of vultures and evangelical exotic birds. O’Connell takes these stories and puts them together like a jigsaw puzzle, forming a tessellated narrative that explores the themes of culture, religion, nature and modernity.
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‘Albino Animals’ spins a yarn using three real-life stories that O’Connell found in the same edition of a local newspaper – the death of “a rare white deer” at the hands of hunters (“they didn’t know the ancients would disapprove of their actions” O’Connell sings), a married drug cooking couple escaping prosecution due to a legal error and the story of an ill-fated transatlantic rower (“our athlete has capsized on an ocean, wide”). The next track, ‘Slow Time Vultures’ is another standout. Inspired by the sight of hundreds of vultures descending upon his parents’ Indiana farm, O’Connell creates a sad, slow-burn folk song about so-called progress and the loss of a way of life. The vultures appeared around the time the Indiana state government first introduced daylight-savings time, and as O’Connell himself put it, “Maybe it goes without saying that the unexplained appearance of a sky full of vultures might seem like a harbinger of doom.”
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‘Demise of the Bible Birds’ ups the tempo somewhat, a perky drumbeat driving the shambling gypsy rock. It sounds like the kind of song the carnies play into the unfamiliar darkness at the edge of camp, long after the local townsfolk are tucked up in their beds. The lyrics tell the story of the “Bible Bird Man” from Noblesville, Indiana, who kept exotic birds (including macaws, a toucan and a peacock) and taught them Christian-themed tricks and stunts (he really did – starting with a pair of Jacob’s Ladder climbing canaries). It’s the sort of story that only songwriters-who-are-also-folklorists (i.e. not many) can write, and I for one am glad to have heard it.
The sixth track opens with the line, “see the monarchs in our gardens” and had me expecting
a song about butterflies. If it is about butterflies then they’re not like any I’ve ever come across as these monarchs wear crowns and golden robes among the rows of marigolds. The track also builds upon another of the album’s key themes, one intrinsically linked to the “progress” that O’Connell addresses on ‘Slow Time Vultures’ — the impact of the human race on the environment: “Because we’re too embarrassed of the kingdom we’ve built”, he sings, “we don’t will it it’s just how we’ve made this living, in machines that roll and towers that tumble, we’ve
got too used to it”. This is followed, quite aptly, by ‘Light Side’, a description of a man’s attempt to lose himself and reach some higher level, “Michael, what was the channel you tuned into on your roof at night?”
The final track takes us back to our old friend the Bible Bird Man, but this time
the mood has changed to a slow and considered patience. The lyrics do a good job of capturing the themes of the album:
“Bible birds he’s taught them the
words but do they understand the meaning?
And if he sets them free will they
still keep him company?
Will they leave the modern lights, all their profitless
desires, return back to their first freedom?”
You can buy Where in Our Woods via Western Vinyl and your favourite record shop.