Stripmall Ballads is the recording moniker of Maryland-based songwriter Phillips Saylor Wisor, a musician who has been releasing atmospheric folk records since 2008. Writing in 2018 about the release Good For a While, we described how he utilises classic conventions of the folk genre to explore current themes and concerns, his music not some pastiche of past masters but rather a continuation of their craft. As we put it in the piece:
Melding Appalachian musical sensibilities with heartbroken, downcast lyrics and dry wit, Stripmall Ballads updates traditional songwriting for the contemporary time, the age-old concerns of death and longing cast through a modern lens to include everything from PTSD and estrangement to Gatorade and rubber gloves.
February saw the release of DISTANT, a brand new full-length album from Stripmall Ballads that develops this style. “There are two kinds of people who will pullover and stop when they see a stranger with a guitar singing at the crossroads,” explains the press release for the record. “The kind you wish who would, and the kind you wish who wouldn’t.” DISTANT is the product of such a sentiment, written from Wisor’s experience of “wandering through the American heartland and underbelly,” with the inevitable “encounters with various souls, both fraught and forlorn.”
Concerning a literal pick up, opening track ‘Susan at the Crossroad’ is the beginning of this journey, Wisor placing all of his faith in the titular Susan, who certainly falls into the kind of person you wish would stop. From here the songs cycle through a series of sights and situations, each offering a distinctive blend of sadness and possibility, as though in the overwhelming longing and regret lies something small and immovable, some distant faith in the possibility of magic, however fleeting that moment might be.
The result is something rundown and dangerous and still pushing on, the American Dream distilled into these poetic vignettes. ‘Pull Over Johnny’ is a great example, a song which took shape after “one evening spent on a levee visiting a with a hustler and woman who were fishing as the sun went down,” Wisor explains. “He was proud of his bait and she was wondering if she should leave town. They were both kind and I wrote this for them and their memory.”
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There’s a mythic, near-Biblical quality to some songs, be it ‘Don’t Mind Me’ with its black skies and fallen towers, or ‘Juice and Sage’ and caves of sharp obsidian. Others feel more personal, tracks like ‘Marietta’ sung from beneath a great weight of wistful longing, stabs of the past arriving as smells and sounds and old touches grown ghostly. All are as concerned with the past as they are the present, and kept alive only by the indistinct future that is surely something brighter than this.
DISTANT is out now and available from the Stripmall Ballads Bandcamp page.