Released in 2020, Charlie Kaplan’s debut album Sunday met personal loss and mourning with a loose-limbed energy, channelling the pantheon of rock greats from Elvis through The Stones, Springsteen and The Grateful Dead to offer an atypical picture of grief. One in which warmth and confidence were the predominant emotions, and cocksure rock ‘n roll certainty illuminated the way. As though, caught within the liminal space between loss and everything thereafter, Kaplan turned to music as a kind of antithetical dimension. A place where everything loss had stripped could be externalised and kept alive, however artificially. If death can make the future unimaginable, then what is rock but its opposite? The medium of the invincible, where the present is an eternal thing.
Described as a prequel to Sunday, Kaplan’s new record Country Life consists of songs written in the years after graduating college, what he’s described as a ‘lost album’ which again strives to create an ideal present within an otherwise difficult time. “I remember the long hours I spent waiting for my life to start,” as Kaplan explains. “I was restless and impatient. To overcome the stultifying quietude of those days, I peered into the guitar to imagine the types of rooms I’d rather be in: Loud, packed, heaving, sweating singalongs to well-loved songs, friends nearby, lost in the moment. This was the setlist for my theater of the mind.”
Latest single ‘Gas Station Bathroom’ captures the tone of the album. Where existential musings are always balance by wry self-deprecation, and playful energy feels like the most important thing. As though in returning to the songs his younger self had written, Charlie Kaplan re-engages which a youthful energy, and this time he possesses the technical and compositional experience to bring it to life more fully. For all the changes in the interim, and the ambiguity of life itself, the fundamental force at the heart of the work remains unchanged. And again that strange sensation suggests itself—rock music as a kind of immortality.
The concept is in some way mirrored in the track’s imagery. A compulsion for movement and speed which persists beyond functionality. “My dad left me his busted old 97 CR-V when he died and I drove it until pieces started falling out of the bottom of the car onto the highway,” Kaplan explains. “The long, mostly solitary hours I spent tracing I-95 up and down the coast over those years were a sometimes maddening, sometimes revealing stage for examining where my life was going in the wake of that loss. Without knowing where to find terra firma, I was unmoored, untethered, and lost, always moving.”
When a friend pulled me over
With a real hot motor
I’ll tell you what he had to sayHe said, “I’m so sick of driving”
He said, “I chased the road, it never ends”
I said, “That’s good enough for some,
But beatable by none”
And let him on his lonely way
