Back in September we previewed I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World, a new album from Steve Slagg. “The record sees Missouri–born, Chicago-based songwriter place personal human experience within the wider patterns of the natural world,” we wrote, “not only to reposition death as just another part of the living cycle, but also interrogate the ways in which our current actions might impinge on this order of things.”
Opener ‘The Newest Soil’ kicked things off with an intensely personal picture of the most intimate of moments, detailing the occasion Slagg and his family spread his father’s ashes upon receiving his remains after a period in which his body had been donated to science. The purpose of the track was twofold: to introduce the audience to the record’s compassionate, unguarded tone, and signify the manner in which it bridges the apparent gap between the personal and environmental and/or political to offer a more holistic picture of life.
And holistic is certainly the right word for I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World. It’s a record about a world undergoing drastic changes. Or rather, one in which drastic change is the whole world. A geological project which traces the layers of time through the ages, where the natural and technological compete to occupy the landscape. “A natural world built on the ruins of a technological world built on the ruins of a natural world,” as Steve Slagg himself puts it. “A garden growing a city growing a garden.”
Some songs explore ideas of migration, be it avian or human. Others represent something like a topological study of a specific part of America, be that geographically (“a farm in Missouri, a river in North Dakota, an orchard in Utah, a park in Chicago”) or thematically (with Western imagery, heroes and villains, as well as concepts of ancestral grounds and land rights). And, ultimately, the album is a simultaneous expression of grief and defiance—the regret of living in a world which for so long we seemed determined to erase, and the affirming decision to exist as truthfully as possible in spite of everything.
Sitting at the heart of the record, the title track serves as something of a centrepiece. A song which opens with three heroes of Slagg’s—Iris DeMent, Rosanne Cash and his grandmother—detailing the virtue and indeed miraculousness inherent within their smallest gestures. Each somehow a bulwark against the cruelty of the world. “Iris’s Mama / Sang hymns at the piano / With her neck craned upward / As if to the Lord,” goes the opening verse. “Roseanne’s daddy / Sang “My God Is Real” / But his fingers loved the feel / Of the minor chords // My grandma drank her coffee black / And mouthed prayers for her boys and girls / I don’t wanna get get adjusted to this world.”
I dreamed I had a vision
My whole body was religion
I flickered, then I glowed
Like Mother Mary didIn my wonder I was singin’
In my terror I was singin’
In my laughter I was singin’
Through my tears I was singin’
In my pain I was singin’
In my pleasure I was singin’
In my patience I was singin’
In my “please”
In my “yes”
