“What the fuck am I doing?” opens the press release for Very Good’s third album, Adulthood. “What the fuck do I do? How does this work?” The clue being in the title, the questions refer to the disorientating period between adolescence and adult life, thrown as you are from the water chute that is education and parental guidance into a pool of alarming width and depth. There’s an expectation of how one stays afloat, a practised swimming technique that’s revealed, in the cold wet moment, to be more effective in theory than practice. So instead you try everything—thrashing and doggy-paddling and flat-out panicking—and hope that you find something halfway workable before your energy gives out.
In the spirit of trying everything, Adulthood is a record unafraid of experiment. The project of multi-instrumentalist Sean Cronin, Very Good does not sit within a genre but nearly all of them, borrowing from the entire gamut of American styles to craft something challenging and singular. The result ranges from the idiosyncratic to the downright bizarre, and Adulthood leans into this, embracing the chaotic collision of styles and shaping it into something intricate, funny and, most impressively, seamless.
The diversity the Very Good sound runs parallel to that of Cronin’s musical life. A formally-trained double bassist who can be said to be both a traditional composer and popular songwriter, Cronin has spent much time immersed with the varying shades of jazz (bebop, swing, New Orleans, modern, etc.). But in addition to that, he has spent time within other scenes, from classical piano as a young child to dive bar country music with his father at twelve. And then the punk bands, the orchestra pit for musicals, the bluegrass tours, not to mention the theatrical scoring work, the indie rock, the modern dance collaborations and so on.
Written several years after Cronin’s own post-adolescent turmoil, Adulthood therefore feels like the most authentic and profound answer to questions asked by many a songwriter. What am I doing? How does this work? Well, unlike the sentimentality and self-help affirmation of most attempts to take on issue, Very Good responds with the messy truth. There is no secret, no shortcut to mature life. Indeed, there may not be such a thing as maturity at all, just degrees of confusion and fear and attempts of varying success to hide them. The absurdity of the record is not a deviation from true experience but a deeper dive into it.
Today sees the release of the title track, a song that provides the perfect encapsulation of Very Good’s odd and playful tone. Jerking into life from a reluctant discordance, the track settles into a loose and languid flow that’s brimming with a peculiar confidence—the weird, past-the-point-of-caring attitude of someone who has long made peace with the absurdity of life. Something of the buoyant and blackly funny style is reminiscent of CHUCK, a tone that might not be happy or glad but has nonetheless come to find things amusing if nothing else. “Welcome to adulthood,” Cronin sings, and if there’s a wry humour to his tone it one matched by that of life itself. “You picked a special time to be alive.”
Photo by Sergio Carrasco, album artwork painting by Betsy Levine (original photograph by Katie Lee), design by Martin Reisle