On the 28th May, 1982, gunman Joseph Billie Gwin entered the KOOL-TV studios in Phoenix, Arizona and held a number of presenters and crew hostage. After a five hour stand-off, they decided to give in to his demands, leaving anchor Bill Close to record a special programme with their unwelcome guest. Claiming to be a Watchman (as in Ezekiel 33), and intending to prevent what he felt was the imminent Third World War, Gwin provided Close a treatise to be broadcast nationwide, with claims and predictions ranging from Islam’s use of sociology to turn American children into hippies and punks, a group called the Ten Prophets that communicate via telepathy (including Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Lucy J. Dalton, who wrote the song ‘Mistakes’ for Gwin), and new cities full of homosexual men (Cyclops, PA, Yosemite, NE etc.) which would be destroyed by nuclear bombs.
The statement is disjointed and muddled, and indeed Gwin himself, sitting next to Close, appears confused and uncertain as his words are read out. He interjects with clarifications that clear nothing up, and, reading over Close’s shoulder, occasionally tells the host to leave sections out. Gwin seems less like the author of the treatise than its messenger, certain of its importance but powerless to alter or interpret it. All in all, he seems just as bewildered by his story as the rest of us—a man alienated not only by the real world, but by his own fictions too.
This sense of estrangement could be said to mark The Horizon Just Laughed, the latest album from Damien Jurado. While the true ideas and narratives are difficult to untangle, the record is united by a pervasive, consistent uncertainty, the various protagonists (or various versions of the same protagonist) disoriented and disaffected by the world around them. Fittingly, Gwin himself makes an appearance, the track ‘Percy Faith’ dedicated to his Watchman inspired convictions and bringing to life the desperate unease that marked his actions.
Alice in disguises
Bill Close taken hostage
“Dear Loretta, these are my demands”
I’ll be selling Arizona to the next potential buyer
Who comes in from the north in search of sandMr. Allan Sherman, I am writing from the future
Where the people never look you in the eye
And there is no need to talk, and the
Sidewalks they walk for you
I know everything and yet no one at all
To position Jurado as an analogue of Gwin might seem to insult his artistic genius, but there is something in his methods that makes the comparison valid. Speaking with Thomas Britt for Popmatters, he expanded upon his strange songwriting philosophy. “By the time I did Visions,” Jurado said, speaking of the third and final album of his Maraqopa trilogy, “I was honestly open to there being a fourth or a fifth or a six or seventh [entry in the Maraqopa series]. I was open to it because at that point I realized that it’s not really me that decides. It’s the song that appears, you know?”
Just like Gwin, Jurado seems just as confused and delighted by what he has written as the rest of us, his role not that of a songwriter but a conduit that can transport songs from whatever dimension they occupy prior to being written. The idea might explain how he went from the devastating, narrative-driven folk of his early career to the experimental dream-psych of the Maraqopa trilogy, and then straddling both on The Horizon Just Laughed—the first step in a natural amalgamation of the two styles.
The album opens with ‘Allocate’, a smooth shuffle that continues the Maroqopa aesthetic, though the snaking confidence of the instrumentation belies the fundamental disquiet of the lyrics. If Maraqopa was born of a dream, the protagonist a dream Jurado or prophetic Jurado or Jurado from a past life, then The Horizon Just Laughed is an attempt to square these possibilities in the real world. Only, this is a real world that has been shaped by the fictional, the dream life informing the real, passing on its DNA to successors as sure as any corporeal ancestor. Is the narrator of ‘Allocate’ Maraqopa’s Jurado pulled from a dream, or past life Jurado taking a different turn, ending up in some parallel dimension? And, if Jurado the artist is merely a conduit, are these alternate Jurado’s the truths or the distortions?
“I don’t know who I am,” he continued to Britt. “You know what I’m saying? I don’t know who I am, I guess is what I’m trying to tell you. I mean, my name? But I’m not my name.” The schizophrenic nature The Horizon Just Laughed attests to this, the easy Sunday morning rhythm of ‘Dear Thomas Wolfe’ all feels like a continuation of the Maraqopa lineage, as does the dreamy ‘Marvin Kaplan’ and strutting ‘Florence – Jean’, whereas ‘Over Rainbows and Rainier’ is return to the classic Jurado sound—slow and fingerpicked, his vocals both whispered and cavernous.
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The aforementioned ‘Percy Faith’ is a hybrid, confident flow meeting insistent emotion, the desperate persistence that drives the verses born of mistrust. The paranoid tone is warranted, the song depicting a new world of constant news, a dog eat dog America of a billion separate callings—deals being shut and guns being shot, men convinced of their own importance, their own mission. On the other hand, the album’s centrepiece, ‘The Last Great Washington State,’ is a great, stirring thing, it’s patient yet consistent build circling around some central truth, honing closer and closer but never quite landing.
Never be sorry for the lack of response
Your hand on my arm before we were lost
The horizon just laughed to see us fall off
Your face in a jar I constantly dropped
You have him now but I’ll have you later
The phone is a gossip
The clock is a murderer
My time is her burden
Your voice is his slumber
How long have we been here?
I can’t quite remember my name
These two tracks, the standouts on a record of standouts, take divergent paths but tackle the same themes, showing that no matter how varied his approaches, Damien Jurado is concerned with a central question. “This kind of all goes back to the character, the protagonist in The Horizon Just Laughed,” Jurado told Popmatters. “He has the continuation of feeling that he doesn’t know his place. He is on a plane that doesn’t land. Or he does land, but every area that he’s landing in, he’s not familiar with the present time, but he is familiar, but he just doesn’t connect with it.”
Because, rather than obscuring the truth behind his identity, maybe this image is the closest thing to describing who or what Damien Jurado represents. While it might be tempting to view his songwriting career as a fruitless quest for his true identity, perhaps the complete opposite is true. His career is his identity, splinters of truth arriving through dreams or divined from another realm entirely, fractals that can be arranged into a whole that far surpasses the meaning of any one component. A manifesto of sorts, one full of prophecy and history, though rather than country-western stars of Gwin’s vision, the Ten Prophets of Damien Jurado are merely alternate versions of himself—past, present, future, dream—each record its own style or consciousness, born of him, yes, but equal to him too.
The Horizon Just Laughed is out now via Secretly Canadian and you can get it now via the Damien Jurado Bandcamp page.
P.S. If you’re unfamiliar with Damien Jurado, and want someplace to start, we made a list of a few of our favourite songs a few years back. Obviously it’s missing any of the newer stuff, but it’s a good introduction nonetheless.
