“It was the summer when the hurricane would blow / Your house to the blocks // You had enough / Of the missionaries building you a new one / ‘Til you could barely stand to see their van roll up.” So sings A.S. Wilson on ‘Robitussin’, the lead single from the new Convinced Friend full-length Nowhere Songs. The lines evoke the sense of place so inherent to the record, with Wilson reflecting on his home south of New Orleans and the people who still inhabit it.
The album’s title is therefore both misleading and perfectly specific. The songs centre on the oilfield town of Houma. Categorically somewhere, yet, at least as far as the rest of the country is concerned, the proverbial middle of nowhere. But there’s another dimension lurking in the title too, one which lends the album its tension and urgency. For Houma and towns like it are on the bleeding edge of the unfolding climate catastrophe, not only battered by ever more violent hurricanes but literally sinking into the sea. One of many places across the world that will soon be nowhere in more than a figurative sense. This record is Convinced Friend’s attempt to commit it to memory.
But no make no mistake, Nowhere Songs is not a lesson in gloating, voyeurism or pity. Wilson might have made it out, but his focus remains firmly on the ground in Houma, shoulder to shoulder with those who walk its streets. An intimacy underlined by a certain sense of disbelief, as though Wilson can’t quite fathom he now lives in Rhode Island, and some part of him never will (which perhaps is not surprising, considering he is one of only two people from his graduating class to leave Louisiana, the other moving to play football for Florida State). “In some ways, I feel like I somehow got… I don’t want to say spared, that feels too strong, but–I got out and other people didn’t, and I don’t exactly know why,” he explains.
But any relief is complicated by competing emotions, something like survivor’s guilt, or else the strange yearning of a writer in exile. Home can be overbearing, claustrophobic, almost inhospitable, but there’s no replacement for it. Those separated from the place they were born are on some level people destined for forever mourn.
Nowhere Songs will be released on the 28th August and you can pre-order it now from the Convinced Friend Bandcamp page.
Photo by Jessina Leonard