“Throwing out the notion of binary happy-or-sad songs, [The EP] opts for something in between, or rather everything at once. Samantha is happy, sad, optimistic, pessimistic, cynical and hopeful within each song… and if you want your art to somehow imitate or represent life then surely that’s the only way to go.”

However, there is one drawback to having strong, literary writing (and a book-heavy music video) – you become a prime target for the Lit Links strand of our Quiet, Constant Friends project. So, I started bugging them by email and, luckily, lead Eric Krewson was more than happy to contribute.

Marilynne Robinson’s Home
by Eric Krewson

Marilynne Robinson is no stranger to success. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second, Gilead, took home the Pulitzer. Even those outside her field have taken notice: President Obama, for example, honored her with a National Humanities Medal and, just two months ago, interviewed her for the New York Review of Books. (That is correct. The President of the United States of America interviewed Robinson, not the other way around.)

And yet, despite these achievements and brushes with fame, despite Faber & Faber recently reprinting Housekeeping as part of its Modern Classic series, Robinson is—by any polling of the public consciousness—largely unknown, unread. My goal is to give a brief primer of her books and, because each differs significantly in tone and content, suggest a starting point for potential readers based on their interests.

Philosophers – Do you spend your days marveling at the world, the seen and unseen? Do you love literature, metaphysics, science, art? Ah then the place to begin is Robinson’s essays, and I suggest the collection The Death of Adam, which includes an illuminating essay—illuminating, especially, for us progressives—about the writings of Charles Darwin. A progressive herself, Robinson muses on the fact that we moderns have rescued Darwin from his own bigotry, rescued him from his own abominable conclusions. From Darwin’s Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasion, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Austrailian or the gorilla.

Dreamers – Do you while away your weekends writing poetry? Do you bore your friends with lines from bards? Do your favorite books collapse the boundaries of time and space, presenting a world that, while anathema to journalistic objectivity, is much more real, much truer than the one reported on the evening news? Well then, Housekeeping and Lila are for you. All of Robinson’s novels are poetic, at times ecstatic, but thanks to luminous female narrators, every page of these books is bathed in mystic light.

Hybrid – Do you enjoy poetry and essays equally? Did you get a B+ or higher in both History and English? We are alike, my friend, and the books most suited for us are Gilead and Home. The latter, my favorite Robinson work, is narrated by Glory Boughton, who is herself both a dreamer and a philosopher. (She is, by profession, a teacher.) In the novel she narrates, Glory has moved home, both to regain her footing after a failed relationship, and to care for her elderly father who has grown impossibly frail since the death of his wife. From the first pages of Home:

Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see [the oak] leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. There had once been four swings suspended from those branches, announcing to the world the fruitfulness of their household. The oak tree flourished still, and of course there had been and there were the apple and cherry and apricot trees, the lilacs and trumpet vines and the day lilies. A few of her mother’s irises managed to bloom. At Easter she and her sisters could still bring in armfuls of flowers, and their father’s eyes would glitter with tears and he would say, “Ah yes, yes,” as if they had brought some memento, these flowers only a pleasant reminder of flowers.

I first read Home in 2008, a few months after my twenty-second birthday. The world economy was bottoming out, and my peers and I were overwhelmed by a very urgent, very real anxiety to find a livelihood where no livelihood existed. We were encouraged to snatch at any flake of subsistence, to wrest it out of the hands of one’s neighbor, if necessary. I had been putting off writing music, which is, if not my calling, certainly my joy, in order to appease this anxiety. Glory spoke to me in reasonable, calm, motherly tones. She taught me that it was OK—even good and right—to stop, to assess. And more importantly, she taught me that it was OK to make art, to say “no” to the zeitgeist and “yes” to my curiosities and convictions. I remember the day I stopped applying to jobs I didn’t want. I wrote a song.

But I still haven’t convinced you to read Robinson? Well then, here is a musical representation of Home, culled from my modest library. Perhaps it will sway you.

You can buy Samantha Says now from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.. The Quiet, Constant Friends compilation is available on our Bandcamp page, including the limited edition tape and art print bundle.

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The EP is essentially an art-pop character study of the eponymous Samantha, the forty-year-old protagonist (That is, if she’s reliable regarding her age) brought into a surprisingly detailed relief across the five songs. As the title suggests, opener ‘Self-Portrait’ serves as our introduction. Samantha’s first-person description is somehow all the more authentic in its indecisiveness, the nebulous, changeable and sometimes conflicting details amass into something far more convincing than a straightforward or lucid profile. Samantha feels human from the first verse, fragile and fragmented and fierce to a point,  self-aware and self-depreciating and funny with it. She’s not optimistic or pessimistic but rather both at once, hope and despair tempering one another to create a wry dreamer, a romantic realist. A human, basically.

‘Looking For a Man’, a song caught between dreams and reality, finds Samantha in the company of one Charlie, a person inclined to pour too much wine (or maybe not enough) and ask if she ever thinks of their love (“I mutter Yes, dear and call on every last saint above”). In between disillusioned words about Charlie, Samantha outlines her ideal man, starting specific (5’9″, waist size 30, a generous heart etc.) and gradually lessening her requirements so that the the truth of the situation unfolds. It’s not so much that she’s unhappy with how Charlie exists in the relationship, but rather how she does. “I would surely settle down,” she says, “In a suburb of Cleveland / If it meant that I could be myself / For just part of the day.”

‘Saint Anne Medal’ shifts the focus away from Samantha’s introspection and thus opens up her world, introducing characters we don’t know in situations we can’t quite grasp, thrusting us into a life with all the connections and complexities you would expect. Here too the Catholic theme develops (after the Augustine reference in the opener), furthering the sense of family, tradition and duty, something expanded on in the subsequent song, ‘Consolation’. Fulfilling the ‘wordy’ promise, the song skips through a tale of grief and reprieve with Darniellian deftness, finding Samantha overrun by the growing feeling that nobody can properly understand her, that she’s forever alone in a world operating on a slightly different frequency. Think twee-indie-movie meets George Saunders, the situation sad and serious yet laced with a dry humour, although the laughs are maybe nothing more than disbelief grown too big to contain. Despite all that the song’s upbeat melodies and harmonies maintain a joyful air which, coupled with the lyrics, manage to paint the miseries on show in an almost positive light, not the limit or lack of life but rather the proof of it.

“I sat reading when the call, harsh, familiar, crass and curt, caught my ear. Why do you memorize such lies? said gruff Henry, lean and tall. I do believe he tried to flirt. He flung my book, he flung my heart into the tide. But the line that caused my fall and left me reeling, on alert, came from Jennifer. She’d surely empathize. [Jennifer:] Why would anyone recall the poems of saints, sackcloth for shirt, some zealots blubbering about the poor, their helpless cries? Consolation—is it so much to ask for? Is it too much to ask for?”

As you might guess from the title, the closing track ‘The Joyful Mother of Children’ finds Samantha a parent. “The long loneliness is over,” she sings, swamped by motherhood and engulfed in gratitude. “I found myself mouthing thank-you throughout the day”. The track is Samantha’s redemption, the validation of previous hopes and dreams, a reward for never quite surrendering faith. Indeed, the development is literally Biblical, echoing the joy of Psalm 113:9, serving as Samantha’s passing from confusion to peace.

“I found myself the joyful mother of children. I look out on the backyard, neighbours calling their sons in. I found myself asking, Ten more minutes? They’re just kids after all, not doing us any harm”

While ‘literary rock’ isn’t always an apt term, Samantha Says shows that rock/pop albums can aim as high as fiction in terms of character development. Throwing out the notion of binary happy-or-sad songs, the EP instead opts for something in between, or rather everything at once. Samantha is happy, sad, optimistic, pessimistic, cynical and hopeful within each song, let alone across the EP, and if you want your art to somehow imitate or represent life then surely that’s the only way to go. Basically, the release sounds like the product of a band finding confidence, cementing their aims and direction and realising how much scope for experimentation there is within songwriting. These are the bands you should keep an eye on. If you like The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River or The Smiths (without the terminal gloom), then you’d be a fool not to check them out.

You can buy Samantha Says now from The Chairman Dances’ Bandcamp page.

Cover art by Natalie Short

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