With album Mirror, Reflect coming in May via Winspear, Amy O has shared single ‘Dribble Dribble’ by way of introduction. The record charts the experience of new motherhood during the pandemic, where twin forces of uncertainty and isolation ran a deep seam of precariousness through everything. But as ‘Dribble Dribble’ shows, Amy O documents this time with compassion and playful curiosity, the lo-fi pop sound lifting rhyming schemes from the books she read to her daughter to offer a mood at once fun and incisive, and Glenn Myers’s backing vocals further the conversational closeness.

Please don’t let the tide rush in
Held unburdened by the wind
A roomful of familiar
No catastrophes within

Bloomsday – Dollar Slice

The recording project of Brooklyn’s Iris James Garrison, Bloomsday introduced itself back in 2020 with debut Place to Land, an album which charted the fear, loss and joyous freedom inherent within the quest to find one’s true identity. But despite the personal subject matter, collaboration has always been an inherent part of the Bloomsday DNA, and new album Heart of the Artichoke is certainly no exception. Coming this summer on Bayonet Records, the release see Iris joined by Andrew Stevens (Lomelda, Hovvdy), Alex Harwood, Richard Orofino, Maya Bon (Babehoven), Hannah Pruzinsky (h.pruz, Sister.) and Chris Daley, and proves to be not only a celebration of togetherness and community but a testament to the enduring presence of friendship itself. Lead single ‘Dollar Slice’ is a great place to jump in, the cornerstone of the album which hints at the sound’s devotional quality. “I’m not religious,” Garrison says, “But I am into the idea of mystical, higher power—whatever that means – and that power seeing me, and my bullshit, and calling it out. That’s kind of godly to me.”

Cereus Bright – Boys

We introduced Boys, the new EP from Knoxville‘s Cereus Bright, back in February with single ‘Drifting’. “An ode to every tired soul and person without direction,” as we put it, “which offers comfort not through the promise of agency but rather the unforeseen benefits of letting oneself relax into the drift.” With the EP now out via Nettwerk, Cereus Bright has released the opener and title track as a final single. Inspired by stories of a “hard, complicated figure” of a grandfather, the song delves into the tangled world of cause and effect not so much in search of an answer but to instead reveal the layers of complexity which define any given person. As the artist explains: “It’s essential to reckon with the people or institutions that have affected us or hurt us, but some times truly understanding is impossible.” The song comes complete with a video filmed by Follow The Leader which you can watch below:

Boys is out now via Nettwerk and available from Bandcamp.

Fresh – Merch Girl

London punks Fresh have made a name with a heart-on-the-sleeve brand of rock, with tracks like ‘Babyface‘ and ‘Morgan & Joanne‘ typifying the bittersweet celebration of the queer experience offered by LP Raise Hell. Ahead of tours with Teenage Halloween and Los Campesinos!, Fresh are releasing a brand new EP Merch Girl on Specialist Subject Records next month, and have unveiled the title track for an early taste. It’s a song “about living in that space between wanting something and achieving something” as lead Kathryn Woods explains, centring on the titular character as they yearn to break free from the sidelines and make art of their own. “Standing at the back of the room / Wishing I could do what they do,” as Woods sings, “After all, I could play that guitar part better / I could hit those drums much harder / I could sing that song far louder // But I’m just a merch girl.”

I’m tired of living like this
Letting people talk over me for years and years and year and years
Gonna start doing things my way
Gonna write a song with a voice so strong it knocks you sideways

I’m not just a merch girl

Hour – Ease the Work

Though named after an image from a tragic Greek myth, Hour‘s 2018 album Anemone Red had more quotidian concerns. “Hour present the same heartbreak and longing as it occurs today,” we wrote in our review, “repressed and layered behind our day-to-day responsibilities, manifest not in blood-dripped flowers but the slow, sad progression of the world around us.” The project, led by Michael Cormier-O’Leary, returns this spring to build upon this foundation with Ease the Work, a brand new release on Dear Life Records. Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation, the album performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness. Listen to the title track now:

Jack Name – Cherie’s Eyes

Described as a “homage to the IRL world and its twisted and varied romance with the worlds of our minds,” Fabulous Soundtracks is the fourth album from Los Angeles-based musician Jack Name, out this May on Maple Death Records. Each song on the record is intended as a mini-soundtrack to a specific scene, and Jack Name runs the gamut of genres and stylistic influences in order to create cinematic soundscapes able to elevate these moments into their full surreal potential. Single ‘Cherie’s Eyes’ is the first example of this singular effort, presenting a sound at once odd and strangely intuitive, as though Fabulous Soundtracks functions within the logic and physics of dreams, where everything is off-kilter yet charged with meaning.

 Logan Lynn – To Be Of Use (Smog Cover)

Songwriter, producer, filmmaker, television personality and activist Logan Lynn is releasing new LP SOFTCORE this June on Kill Rock Stars. The album, written in the aftermath of a break-up, serves as a vehicle of rebirth. “A record of my coming alive again, and coming back to myself in the face of pretty extreme betrayal,” as Lynn puts it. “It’s a party album in a way—loud, wild, unhinged and abrasive at times—but it’s also a collection of tender songs about longing and togetherness.” A cover of Smog’s ‘To Be Of Use’ opens the album, a plaintive track which slowly gathers momentum, as though Lynn uses Bill Callahan as a way to shake off the shrouding gloom and turn a new page.

Magana – To My Love

Last month we introduced Magana‘s new album TEETH on Audio Antihero with the single ‘Paul’. “A song where grief is transcribed almost verbatim,” as we put it, “and tenderness, strangeness and plain disbelief can exist simultaneously.” With the album out today to coincide with the Worm Moon’s peak illumination, Magana has released final single ‘To My Love’ to further introduce the witchy rock atmosphere. A strange sound for a strange world, made by an artist determined to use every style available to best communicate their own experience of trying to exist within it.

Pina Palau – We’ve Got No Time At All

“The birds outside my window, they are singing as if the world was still the same.” So opens ‘We’ve Got No Time At All’, the centre point of Get a Dog, the sophomore album by Pina Palau. It’s a song that very directly captures the despair felt by young people across the globe, describing a world of war and mass shootings, heatwaves that “no AC can get us out of.” The Swiss artist put a career in medicine on hold to pursue her musical career, and her creative work is driven by the same fascinations that led her to the path to becoming a psychologist—what label Mouthwatering Records describe as “a desire to understand unvarnished humanity—the motivations, emotions and stories that shape our lives.” Which is why ‘We’ve Got No Time At All’ stands out on an album full of varied emotions. A rare track that stares down a generation’s biggest concerns head-on, blowing out into furious noise in its cathartic climax.

We’re still young they say we have time
But the truth is: we’ve got no time at all

The post Weekly Listening: March 2024 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The song is constructed from a multitude of small details, dreams and snapshots and sensations which knit together into a kind of abstract storyboard for good times. Or a vivid representation of life’s sunny side. A shiny plum indeed.”

Ben was kind enough to answer a few of our questions, so have a read below as we discuss imaginary audiences, sincerity in music and the poetry of Eileen Myles.

Hi Ben, thanks for speaking with us! How is life now that Bowl of Plums is out in the world?

I honestly feel wonderful! The release show last week was really, really nice and putting this record out has been a really opportune moment to reconnect with people + talk to some new folks. I’m a little bit relieved, also – happy to finally cross the finish line. I’ve been walking around beaming!

The writing/recording process sounded like an interesting one, with a collection of very different songs coming into being pretty much right across America (from Alaska and California to Brooklyn and Queens), so much so that you’ve describe the album as a “greatest hits album”. Was this your intention from the beginning?

I never intended to write the album that way. After a few years of bopping around, through touring and visiting my family out west and doing some different artist residencies, I had a pretty big grab bag of different songs that weren’t necessarily part of one larger body of work. Thinking of the “greatest hits” helped me conceptualise everything, and helped me find the thread of humanity that was common to all these tracks.

I also liked how it’s a little tongue-in-cheek – greatest hits albums are for people like Tom Petty and the Eagles, goliath recording artists whose songs top the charts. Calling my tiny little campfire of an album anything grandiose is an almost-funny joke.

Also – “Yellow Roses,” an album-length song/jam I put out on tape in 2015 was partly about really embracing a classic rock vibe, just laying super hard into dominant chords and multiple guitars. We kept thinking of the tape design as something you’d pick up in the discount music bin of a car wash, a 50 cent tape of a band from the late 70s that nobody had ever heard of. I think maybe the “greatest hits” idea started creeping in there a little bit.

Do you think you’d like to go back to any of the tracks and write a more cohesive album around it? I mean, will we see any of the trees from which the plums fell?

It’s possible! But I don’t have any specific plans right now. The thing I’m working on now is based on my teenage years in California when I was just starting to outgrow religion – I’ve been listening to Everclear a lot for inspiration, haha, so who knows.

The thing that strikes me most about Bowl of Plums is how you manage to capture those transient moments of wonder and joy. Do the songs arrive in your brain like that, in little golden instances? Or do you work hard to conjure that feeling through trial and error?

I actually find that the harder I work on something – especially its words – the less resonance it has. The title track, for instance, went through a number of lyrical changes over the course of a few months that I was never happy with – I ended up using the very first draft of lyrics, the words I scrawled down in a beat-up notebook while I was hunched over a table still awkwardly wearing my guitar. Something like first thought, best thought. Revision and fine-tuning is something that I admire in a lot of other singers and writers but for me it just seems to dull my instincts and pull me out of the soft, human dreams I’m trying to live in with these songs.

The other thing that strikes me, as was the case with your self-titled album, is the sincerity of your writing. There are a million and one things I could ask about this but one thing I do wonder is how much of this is a concerted effort on your part? Does sincerity flow? Is it your default setting? Or does it require practice and patience and hard work?

I think the sincerity flows, dude! And I think it flows in most people, too, but for various reasons we learn over and over again to be cool, a little distant, intellectual, whatever. Maybe it takes hard work to overcome those impulses.

Without sounding like too much of a stoner – – you can’t aim for sincerity, I don’t think. You can’t say, “I would like this thing to be sincere.” With that thought, you have automatically disqualified the sentiment from ultimate sincereness…you know? You say something, make something, and if it’s an honest exploration of a compelling subject, done with tenderness and maybe, like, a lack of guile, then it might be resonant and might appear pure-of-heart. But you can’t aim to make something sincere.

Would you say you experience increased anxiety when sharing songs so vibrant and personal? Like, all artists suffer the will-people-like-it? thing but it must be more difficult when you put so much of yourself and your experiences down so clearly (as opposed to, say, masking it with irony or diluting it with fictitious characters and events)?

I have certainly been scared of people not liking what I make in the past, but I think I’ve outgrown that fear – – I’m pretty confident in what I do and, more importantly, I know that it’s for sure not everyone’s cup of tea. I’d hate to disappoint my regular listeners with a turd of an album, but I would also never put something out that I wasn’t stoked about and proud of personally. So, no!

The thing that I’m REALLY anxious about is the album and the songs just not making much of an impact, just kind of vanishing into the ever-growing content void. I recently called Bowl of Plums a paper sailboat, carrying my heart, set out to drift on the ocean. It’s also something like setting off a cherry bomb in a metal trash can – I’ve lit the fuse and I’m just hoping that the explosion is physical and loud and satisfying instead of anti-climactic – – mm, yes, haha. That is the thing that worries me right now.

Fortunately this interview will help!

You shared an Eileen Myles poem with the release. Did you have the poem in mind when forming the album, or did you discover it later and think it relevant? Does poetry and literature in general play a role in your creative process?

I was reading Eileen Myles’ semi-autobiographical poetic memoir kinda book Inferno (a poet’s novel) the summer I wrote a lot of this material. Such a great book, really hypnotic and steamy and smelly – – very accurately captures something about New York City, I think. And it’s just so direct and fearless – proud, too. I think her writing and her poems just made me want to sing about things that weren’t easy, to push through.

Later on, after I had been recording for a while, I came across the quote I ended up using as the epigraph – having written numerous songs name-checking flowers and, in one verse, just naming a few, it was too perfect – it concisely summed up the sheepish and outlandish presentation of a bouquet of flowers that I believe this album to be.

I love books, love getting lost in them, and find that the best ones allow you a totally reckless intimacy that’s extremely special and rare. I always think about that idea that Whitman had where, while you read Leaves of Grass and hold his work in your hands, you actually holding him himself. My big project in making music is finding, celebrating, and creating intimacy and tenderness and my notions of what that all means definitely comes from books. And I hope there’s something like that for people who hear my songs.

You’re releasing an EU version of the record through Italian label Love Boat Records (which is a great idea, speaking as a fan of North American music stuck the wrong side of the Atlantic), and plan to tour there this summer. Why Italy in particular?

It’s honestly “just one of those things” – I’ve happened to build an audience in Italy specifically, thanks mostly to the tireless efforts of Andrea Pomini, a musician and music critic who downloaded my last album illegally when it came out in 2014 and ended up championing it as a good, if totally under-heard, record. Once he wrote about the self-titled album in a magazine called Rumore, I suddenly had a sizeable audience in a country I had never been to. Since then, I’ve just taken every opportunity possible to go there and play and do more.

Someone smarter than me might be able to figure out more specifically why my music is resonant there – I’m just happy that it happened.

Essentially, one person happened to hear my music there and believed in me.

If anyone in other countries would like to do the same, I am open to the idea! Would love to be able to tour Japan regularly, for instance.

On a semi-related note, do you ever think about your target audience when writing and recording? Like, aside from family/friends/enemies, do you have a hypothetical listener in mind? What do they look like?

There isn’t a specific person, I don’t think. At least not right now – there have been targeted individuals in the past. I might describe the audience I think of like this – – a crowded room, maybe 20% people I know and 80% strangers, as if I’m opening for someone (actually, I think I’m imagining the time I opened for Evan Dando). And I think about how to win them over, do something approaching beautiful, and ultimately be, um, of some help, I guess is how to say it. How to do right by a tiny sliver of humanity.

I do not currently imagine my many enemies but I think I would like to start doing that!!

Finally, could you suggest 4-5 bands you think we should be listening to? Feel free to name old classics or new buzz bands, whatever you find yourself returning to.

-I’m really into Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith right now and, by extension, really feeling modular synth videos on YouTube.
-I just watched two Bill Callahan sets two nights in a row and I’m completely obsessed, once again, with “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love” and his cover of Kath Bloom’s “The Breeze.”
-I’m really into Abdullah Ibrahim / Dollar Brand, specifically a track called “African Marketplace” that rules.
-The new Karl Blau country album wow, yes yes
-Looking forward to the Uni Ika Ai album coming out in the fall – this track is very good
-And like, just in case – if anyone hasn’t heard “New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü it is pretty much the best song of all time

Bowl of Plums is out now and you can buy it from the Ben Seretan Bandcamp page, or on cassette from Hope For The Tape Deck. For those of you in Europe (and that includes us in the UK, at least for now), Italian label Love Boat is putting out vinyl and CD editions on the 8th July.

Cover photo by Dan Sullivan, main body photos by Sean Pierce

The post Interview: Ben Seretan appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Jon: Hi Austin, thanks for speaking with us! How are things with you? And how are preparations for the new album?

Austin: Thanks for getting in touch! I’m doing well. Seattle is a beautiful place in the summer so I’ve been trying to spend a lot of time outside in parks and in the mountains. Things are coming along nicely with preparations for the release. This is the first time I’ve released new music through a label, so it’s been fun to learn about everything it takes to release a record at this scale, and to be intentional about setting things up well. The band in Seattle has been playing together a lot recently. I’m excited to play some more shows and share the songs with people.

How would you describe the themes of When I Was A Child? What did you set out to achieve with it (if anything)? The press release says it “contemplate[s] life, love, and death, faith and doubt, time and space”. Would you agree with that?

The majority of these songs were written during a 3-year season of my life when I wasn’t really playing shows out at all. Most were written without the idea of any upcoming release in mind. During much of this time I was living in Kentucky and teaching, taking classes, and working on my master’s thesis for 12+ hours a day. Songwriting has always been a way for me to engage with the sort of themes mentioned in your question, but I think especially in that season of intense grad studies, these songs became a way for me to maintain a dialog with where I had been and where I was going. It was only during the process of compiling songs for recording that I noticed how they were cohesive, or at least complementary, thematically. Since these songs come from a time of life that saw a lot of change for me personally, I guess they are a testament to that change, growth, and movement.

The lyrics on the album are packed with doubt and questions, yet there seems to be an overarching clarity, as if you now have answers or else have accepted the answers aren’t coming. It got me thinking of a Checkov quote, something along the lines of “art can’t answer questions, but it can help us formulate them correctly”. Does creating your own music help focus serious personal stuff in ways you didn’t expect when starting out?

I like that conception of art by Checkov very much. I studied Russian language and literature for my undergrad, and I think I resonated with the overarching approach of authors like Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy to the human condition – precisely because they honestly engaged how fragile our minds are, how limited our understanding can be, and how mysterious it is to be alive and in community with others, let alone a deity. Personally, I’ve always been drawn to songs that contain an element of mystery or open-endedness, songs that invite your mind to inhabit them with your own reality and questions. Songwriting, for me, can be an exercise in engaging difficult questions – whether those are questions of faith and doubt, or questions of what it means to move away from home, or even to share your life with someone else. The songs on When I Was A Child do at times wrestle with what can and can’t be known, and try to make peace with that. But the value of music and art for me is to creatively engage that process, not necessarily to arrive at or broadcast the conclusions.

Kind of related to the above question, but do you think of others when writing? Like, do you have a perceived audience, or do you do what works for you and hope that it resonates? And do you ever think about how your music can help other people with these big questions too?

While I don’t feel like I write songs with any particular audience in mind, and I would probably have written these exact songs even if they didn’t have an anticipated audience at all, I do think the audience is immensely important to the process of revision and performance. I’ve always had an impulse to share a song soon after it’s written with a bandmate or friend, or sometimes even to try it out at a show. I feel like having someone else present and gauging their reaction helps me figure out where I’m at with it personally. But perhaps most importantly, it gives me a sense of whether or not the song feels honest to play in front of others. If it feels honest when I share it, that’s the most meaningful thing for me.

I do hope others find meaning in the songs as well. It’s always really special to know that someone else has connected with a song I’ve written – but exactly how that happens is totally out of my control. Aside from overtly religious or political kinds of writing (such as hymns or protest songs), I’ve never liked the idea that songs are 100 percent “about” x, y, or z. People sometimes ask me what certain songs are about and I never know how to answer that question, it kind-of makes me uncomfortable. Obviously there is the static artifact of a recorded song, and of course songs are written in particular moments with unique intentions and thought processes – but I see songs as living entities that we engage with differently over time, whether we are playing them or listening to them. So the twelve songs on When I Was A Child came from specific moments and events in my life, but how they remain meaningful for me is always changing. That’s the only way I can keep playing them into 2016 and beyond and not feel like a fraud. Insofar as people listen to the lyrics, I hope they will find meaning in them over time in their own ways. If the songs are helpful with sorting through big existential questions, that’s great. Or sometimes just listening to music as a background to driving or walking through a park is nice too.Where do you get the inspiration for your music? Lots of coverage focuses on your upbringing and religion, but what else inspires you? Do you draw upon the work of other musicians? Or perhaps works of literature?

Well my music is certainly inspired by where I’m from. I think that my upbringing in the US South in a fairly conservative religious community is one reason I’ve taken a lot from writings by the likes of Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy, or from 19^th and 20^th century Russian literature. Generally speaking, one of the most fascinating things to me about music and literature is how people’s sense of place comes to bear on their work. It seems to me that people usually have fairly complicated or conflicting relationships with their homes and upbringings – it’s rarely simple. For me and for many friends that I grew up with, our coming into knowledge of the world and our place in it was infused with religious belief and practice, as interpreted by our families, communities, and churches. There was a lot of beauty and love in that upbringing, and I’m thankful for it, but there are also aspects of evangelicalism that I now find fairly troubling, personally and politically. Songwriting has been one way to work through that, but I wouldn’t say it’s the focus or key inspiration for my music any more than present realities of my life are.

In general, I spend a lot of time listening to records and going to shows in Seattle these days. When I hear or see something great, it always makes me want to be a better writer and performer. I’m inspired by songwriters like Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Damien Jurado, Chan Marshall, Phil Elverum, and Dan Bejar, to name a few, who have made diverse and compelling songwriting records over the last two decades and are still going. Jason Molina’s songs have been a source of inspiration to me since I first heard Didn’t It Rain at age 17. I never met him personally, but his records are such a gift. It’s been hard to come to terms with his passing.

Do you feel more distant from some of the songs because they were written a few years ago? Or do you feel that they have finally been given the treatment they deserve?

This record has been over two years in the making, between sessions at Archer Avenue Studios with Kenny McWilliams in Columbia, South Carolina and at the Unknown with Trevor Spencer in Anacortes, Washington. Good friends contributed to the recordings in each location (Amy Godwin and Nathan Poole in both). So I feel proud of what the record represents as a whole – in a big way because it is representative of my communities of friends and musicians on both ends of the country. I’m glad that it will be coming out on vinyl. Thanks to everyone involved, I ultimately feel like it developed into an appropriate treatment of these songs that I’m excited to put into the world.

Does this feel like the start of a new chapter, and can we expect more Valley Maker material in the future?

I think moving to Seattle in late-2013 was the start of a new chapter for the project. Upon moving here I started to play a lot more shows and I’ve gotten to know some amazing musicians and people in this city and wider region. Amy Godwin, who sang on both Valley Maker records, is living here now and I’m so honored to be able to play with her on a regular basis, along with Drew Fitchette (bass, guitar) and Wendelin Wohlgemuth (drums, percussion). I’m always writing new songs, and I’ll be excited for the time to come to start compiling material for the next record, but now seems like the proper season to inhabit the songs on When I Was A Child. Some of these have indeed been around for a while, but I don’t feel particularly distant from them. What the songs mean to me is always developing, and part of my vision for this project is to interpret the songs differently with the band in various live settings – that helps keep things fresh as well.

I saw that you recently uploaded your self-titled debut album to Bandcamp. Why did you decide to make it available after all this time? And do you still feel proud of those songs, which were written a part of your senior thesis project in 2010?

That record is a strange beast for me. I do feel proud of it as a collection of songs, and I see it as a foundational moment for this songwriting project. It was the first time Amy and I worked together; it was the first time I wrote mostly on the nylon guitar with alternate tunings; and it was the first time I really tried to give the songs I recorded space to breathe – to only bring to the recording what the songs needed. I had the first record online to download for free for about two years, and it was fascinating to me how people around the world found it and connected with it, with hardly any promotional efforts on my part. The internet has interconnected our lives in strange ways, but I guess that’s not always a bad thing.

As you wrote in your question, that record was written in 2010 for my undergraduate senior thesis project at the University of South Carolina, and it focused thematically on narratives from the Biblical Book of Genesis. So songwriting-wise, it was a momentary, structured focus on stories of beginnings that I had grown up being taught were foundationally true. For me it was both an academic and personal project to look at them in a new light by focusing on their humanity and mystery. But as years went past, and particularly as I moved to Seattle and actually started to play music regularly again, it felt increasingly strange for these to be the only songs people could access from the project. I didn’t want Valley Maker to be pigeonholed as a sort-of “Bible songs” conceptual project, because for me it had already evolved far beyond the thesis record into a general songwriting project. All that being said, I am still happy for people to be able to access that record. It just seemed appropriate to bring it back in concert with plans for new material to be released. That way 22 and 27 year-old me are both represented.Finally could you name 4 or 5 bands/artists that you’ve been enjoying lately? They can be brand new or from a hundred years ago, whatever you like.

I saw Tinariwen play in Seattle a few weeks ago and it was mind-blowingly good. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about guitar-based music from Africa over the last few years, and it was really incredible to be in the presence of that style of playing. I’m really moved right now by the work of Sidi Toure and Boubacar Traore, who are both guitarists and singers from Mali. I’ve been a big fan since Michigan, but Sufjan Steven’s latest record was nearly the only thing I listened to for several months – just incredible songwriting. My most listened to record of the last two years is probably Joanna Newsom’s Ys; it’s a gift that keeps giving. I’ve also been really enjoying Chad Vangaalen’s last two records. Finally, my friend Chris Staples in Seattle is a wonderful songwriter; we’ve played some fun shows together recently and I love his latest record. Sorry, that’s more than five.

When I Was A Child will be released on the 25th September. You can (and definitely should!) pre-order it now via Brick Lane Records. We’ll get a full review up nearer to release. You can read our review here.

The post Interview: Valley Maker appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“In the Dark on 99 is in many ways the realist representation of winter, the real-life counterpart to the romantic crunch of snow and hot cocoa. That said, it deals with this in a much more interesting way than merely saying ‘actually, winter is cold and dark and the snow turns to muddy slush…’ The album probes what winter means, what it does to us, how it becomes less a season than some existential force.”

The Black Pits, Cuming’s latest EP, looks to build on the album and explore themes of travel and isolation in a land where the elements hold a significant curiosity. Again, his lyrics are cryptic and poetic and delivered in that Bill Callahan sort of style which made In The Dark… so evocative, drawing the listener through the tracks like the faceless narrator of a dream. Opener ‘Keep Trying’ is the perfect example, the strange vocals backed by an incisive and vaguely menacing instrumentation reminiscent of Old Earth:

The wind will turn/ Against your back/ Your back will talk/ To/ the window’s crack/ As time cloves two/ On a strong boat on the moor/ You’ve heard this before/ It’s sparser than ever/ So keep on trying/ Keep trying

Each track enlists a different producer, with fellow musicians like Garrett Johnson, Layne L’Heureux and Tyler Butler taking over the duties, so it is Cuming’s distinctive vocals which provide the cohesion across the six songs. ‘Long Life’ slows slightly, the track brooding and rhetorical (“What do you know?/ Are you strong?/ Do you travel?/ Does the wind even make you cold?”), while ‘Lost in Time’ relaxes further, the vocals becoming smooth and fluid, like some quasi-doo-wop act in a smoke-filled club too late at night. The lyrics become odder on the restrained ‘Quiet Dream’, fragmented but compelling, grasping at a logic just out of sight.

“I’ve heard a hundred sorry midnight’s score/ That electric hum, the loner’s lullaby/ To kiss another gunshy infant morn/ To drink another bloodshot evening dry”

In comparison, ‘Stay Inside’ is heavy, a track smothered by mean reverb that is ominous both in terms of sound and lyrics. “When you wake up in the morning,” Cuming sings, “don’t open up your eyes. As you’re walking out the door, stay inside”. However, the title track closes the release on a more upbeat note, with the hostile drone replaced by brighter, shimmering guitars.

Heaven/ I would remember/ A fleeting sheet in time/ A symbol of a sign/ At home/ And darkness breeds alone/ It trembles with desire/ But in the blackest pit, there was a shovel for me/ Hold tight

The Black Pits EP is out now on Bart Records, and you can buy it from the Jom Comyn Bandcamp page.

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I’ve been reading a collection of short stories by Richard Ford, Rock Springs, where the assorted characters do little more than merely exist in the little lives that they complicate for themselves. They are people who struggle to communicate, struggle to find peace in others, struggle to escape the melancholy of an individual’s ultimate lonliness, but refuse to give up and be reclusive or eternally pessimistic. These people keep going back for more, the vague flickering optimism of the constant motion of time and the possibility it brings (a new start or finding ‘The One’) too alluring to ever stop looking. Often these stories take place within recognisable situations, circumstances we can all remember or imagine happening to us. They aren’t fantastic or far-fetched. They aren’t fantasy. They are real problems and feelings woven into everyday actions, great drama and psychic pain in its true form, tiring and boring and in no way noble.

Dream River, despite the title, reminded me of this style of storytelling. Bill Callahan’s lyrics are packed with emotion and meaning but are not concerned with fantastic metaphors. There is a feeling of practicality, a sense of everyday functioning, characters living, existing, rather than narrating from some abstract position outside of their reality. These are characters rooted in their lives, men telling their story through actions rather than thoughts. It’s as if you are watching their lives unfold rather than listening to their recollections.

One of the key ingredients of this everyday cycle of melancholy and hope is the passage of time – it allows regret and loss but always enables a prospect of something different, a brighter future. One can bear painful or monotonous situations because time passes and things inevitably change. Dream River often references the natural world, the bigger picture, a reminder that outside of each discrete narrative there is always something infinitely bigger, some ancient certainty of change that can never be influenced by mere individuals. Take ‘Summer Painter’ for example:

’I painted names on boats for a summer…
…I painted these while beavers built dams all around me’

’And come September, come fall
Holding a job was not believable behavior at all, so I split
But like a beaver is a dam builder, you never really quit
I made some dough and I socked it away
I always said for a rainy day’

Callahan uses nature as an example of his message. Throughout the album there is mention of trees and eagles and rivers, simple, knowable things which for whatever reason conjure a sense of something unknowable, something too expansive or old to properly define. Even the composition brings to mind some organic space, some untamed wilderness. It matches perfectly the whole atmosphere of Dream River, where people tell simple stories that conjure strange feelings, tales that hint at something mysterious and meaningful and important with nothing more than ordinary words. The result is something positive. While it admits that we cannot sit down and work out answers to the questions of life, it hints that simple things are not necessarily superficial, and in them we can find solace and happiness. As it says in ‘Winter Road’:

’Oh I have learned when things are beautiful
To just keep on, just keep on
Oh, when things are beautiful, just keep on’

Does it matter why things make us feel better? Bill Callahan tells us that it’s the fact they do is what’s important.

You can buy Dream River from Drag City or the Bill Callahan Bandcamp page.

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Hi Wes, I hope all is well with you? How is life in North Carolina this time of year?

Hey Jon! Thank you for inviting me for a Q&A. All is pretty well here in North Carolina. Summer’s coming to a close, and I’m getting ready for my final semester. I’m going camping with my best friend next weekend for a booze filled last hurrah –– then I’ll have my nose stuck in a book for 4 months.

You self-released your new EP, I Stood Among Trees, last February. How exactly did it come about?

Before going into the studio to record I Stood Among Trees I had a couple of years where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my music. I wasn’t playing out much, and I was struggling with writing lyrics (though I was writing a lot of instrumental pieces, most of which will be on an upcoming release with Orange Milk Records). Finally I realized that it was taking a huge toll on me and forced myself to get one new song I was satisfied with –– so I wrote “The Time Leaves So Soon” over a couple of days. Not too long after that I wrote “Wild Beasts.” I talked to a buddy of mine who worked at Echo Mountain Recording in Asheville about getting in for a couple of sessions and he hooked me up with a deal. We busted out the EP in two marathon sessions. (In fact, I went in to record two EP’s, but ended up scrapping everything but “When Your Eyes See The Valley,” which eventually ended up on I Stood Among Trees.) Being in the studio is always stressful, mostly because of money, but Echo Mountain is an incredible studio, so it was definitely worth it. I was also writing my thesis at the time. (I should mention that the EP will be re-released in the near future on the German label Dying for Bad Music. It’ll contain some bonus home demo tracks, as well.)

In my review of the EP I mentioned a fantastic piece on Hearth Music, where you write about a few of the songs (and answered a lot of the questions I would have otherwise asked). For ‘Final Resting Place’ you explained that you half-wrote a song while driving home and that news of the market crashing upon your return caused you to sit down and finish it off with this new event in mind. This may be an internal, unexplainable feeling, but how do you decide to change a song rather than write a new one? Can a song that was drastically altered due to some mood or occurrence ever revert to its original form when you play live?

Well, until a song is actually finished it’s always a work in progress. I had the apocalyptic motif in mind as I was writing “Final Resting Place” in my head, and the market crash of 08 was just a continuation of that. For me, songs either come really fast –– done in 20, 30 minutes –– or over the course of a couple days, sometimes a week or two if I’m really patient with it.

The song will be done in that the lyrics and the chords are complete, but a song always changes a bit every time you play it. I’ve never tried revising a song before. I’ve thought about trying it, though, just to see what would happen.

But when a song comes, I always recognize where it’s coming from. Sometimes a new song will pop up in the midst of writing one song, but I never think about mixing them –– even if they’re from a similar place, they’re still not from the exact same place.

You also mentioned in that Hearth Music piece that the track ‘Wild Beasts’ was inspired partly by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I hadn’t really heard the song in that way, but now going back and listening with a context (if that makes sense), the imagery seems obvious. Does literature have a great influence on your writing in general, or just on certain songs?

and…

What else influences your music? I guess other songwriters play a big part? Is there anything else you would cite as a big part of your sound?

Literature’s certainly a big influence. Sometime’s a particular text informs part of a song, sometimes all of it. Sometimes I seek out a text just because I think it’ll inspire a song. I’ll be releasing a new EP soon titled “False Idols” that has a couple songs that I wrote after reading biblical texts: The Book of Ezekiel and The Gospel of Judas. I just thought I’d like to write about them –– so I read them for the sole purpose of writing about them. But almost every text I read I try to keep in mind how I can appropriate something for a song.

The songs I’m writing currently for a future full-length are literary in that they have a bit of a consistent fictional narrative, though it’s all completely real and factual.

The philosophy influence comes out a little differently. I tend to have an environmental bent to my lyrics, and that comes from really thinking about radical perception and awareness. Even the most minute perception can spark a song. I try to develop every song in it’s only locale or geography, it’s own place, so that I can step into it. I know some songwriters like to keep themselves outside of their own songs; I can’t do that. I have to be in it entirely, otherwise I don’t see the point.

Certain painters or paintings aren’t a huge influence, but they’re influential, as well. I love Jackson Pollock and Andrew Wyeth. Most people would deem them radically different painters, but I think they wade in the same waters. Sometimes I think “how do I write a song like ‘Christina’s World?’” and try to figure it out.

One line of the Hearth Music piece which really stood out was that ‘Finally Resting Place’ (which is probably my favourite, for what it’s worth) nearly missed the cut for the EP as you weren’t convinced with your vocal performance. Is the vocal side of things the part you find most difficult? You study philosophy, read fiction, work at a writing centre on campus and the instrumental pieces show that you can obviously play. Is your voice where you suffer a lack of confidence? Does singing come naturally to you? Or is it a forced, necessary evil to bind together your music and your writing? And I don’t mean this in terms of vocal talent (I don’t think there are people who can or cannot sing), but rather do you feel a compulsion to sing in the way you do to play and write?

I first started out as a guitar player, and then when I started writing songs, singing just became part of the job. I had never really sang before, but I had the words, so I had to sing them. (Listening to some of those old songs is torture, though.) I don’t think it’s a matter of confidence for me (though I by no means have much of a range) –– whenever I perform live I settle into everything pretty comfortably. Plus I like to sing.

In the tradition I come out of, though, none of the greats are much of a singer anyways –– it’s more of an emotive quality, which is what I’m after, anyways. I heard an interview with Leonard Cohen where he said that he told his manager before going on stage for his first show that he had no clue what he was doing. His manager told him that they were all terrible singers. That made me happy to hear that.

The vocal performance is always in service of the lyrics. The lyrics are the most important part of the song, so I just want the vocals to fit with them. But I’m not really bothered at all that my songs aren’t that melodious. I write songs not melodies.

You put up the lyrics for the EP on your Bandcamp page. This is something that I like as I feel it lets me look closer at a song and find deeper meanings (be they intentional on your part or not). However I recently saw another musician (I can’t find the quote now) say that he didn’t really like sharing the lyrics as he felt they prevented the listener from developing their own ideas about the song, which is pretty much the flipside of my opinion to reach the same end. Do you make a considered decision to let us listeners read your words as well as hear them? Do you want the songs to be writing too? Or is it more a case of the option is there so you copy them in without much deliberation?

I don’t understand why a songwriter wouldn’t want to share their lyrics. That’s odd –– but to each their own. The lyrics are so essential to the song, and there is indeed a definite meaning or story behind each song, otherwise I wouldn’t write them (even if the listener walks away with a different meaning), so I feel like I have to present the lyrics. Again, that’s where the most thought goes into the songwriting process. Of course I think about the guitar and vocals, but it’s all in service of the lyrics. In the end, the complete song is a mixture of all these different things that form a whole, but it’s all born out of a line or two of lyrics.

With the help of your fans (via an Indiegogo campaign), you hope to tour Italy next winter. Can you elaborate on your plans? What do you plan to do there? Why exactly Italy?

April Wolfe of Common Folk Music does my PR, and she got the EP a review on the blog The Mad Mackerel soon after it was released. Giuseppe Marmina, who does a hundred different things in the music scene in Italy read the review, bought the EP, and offered to do some PR help in Italy. Next thing I know, I’m getting radio play and the EP’s getting reviewed on some popular blogs and webzines. The response was so well that I thought it’d be smart to go over and play some shows. I got in touch with some folks and eventually Alessio Pomponi of Unplugged in Monti put together a weeklong tour for January 2014. Alessio and the venues have been so incredibly kind with helping put the tour together –– it’s really something else.

Philosophy student/writing center tutor/songwriter doesn’t exactly equal financial stability, so I’m seeking some help for the airfare. People can check out the campaign to see what perks they get for contributing. I’m beyond grateful and thankful for any and all contributions.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists that you are enjoying at the moment?

I’ve been listening to Michael Hurley, Bill Callahan, and Mickey Newbury religiously the last few weeks. Mickey Newbury is especially blowing my mind –- his songs are so heartbreaking. Other than that, I’ve been listening to a lot of Roscoe Holcomb and Elizabeth Cotten; some sacred harp here and there, plus an Orange Milk Records release called “Engines of Joy” by Maharadja Sweets –– good lord will that blow your mind. There’s also a song on a Dust-to-Digital collection I listen to over and over called “I’m Dying, Mother” than just kills me every time I listen to it. It damn near brings me to tears.

Jon: Make sure you check out the EP and keep an eye out on Dying For Bad Music for the re-release. If you have a bit of spare change then why not help Wes go to Italy in exchange for nice gifts? Also, you may be interested in this DIYtrotter session from HI54LOFI.

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