Three Unrelated Songs That I Happen to Enjoy

I listened to three different songs yesterday. I love each of them. Here are my rambling accounts of why, accompanied by the song.

“Travelling Alone” Jason Isbell

I have a super soft spot for country music. I think its my Utah heritage and memories of drunken family gatherings with Hank Williams (followed, of course, by Hank Williams Jnr) playing in a weirdly aggressive way in the background. He always sounded like a threat to start drinking. Even as he sang longingly through my cousin’s truck stereo, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” there was always a kind of competitive note in the air that was loving, in a familial way, but also seemed to mutter, ‘I dare you to bring anything contemporary into this primal space. This is family.’

Country music for me embodies the tensions in my enormous American family that make them such great fun. Because even as they argue and bicker, whiskey in hand, one eye out for the Bishop, there remains present that sense of affection: a unity reflective of the narratives in the music that act as our soundtrack. Great country songs are a testament to the American tradition of tight songwriting (not Walmart country, by the way). Lyrically and melodically they walk in perfect step, slightly honky perhaps, but utterly self-aware of their message and means of delivery. It is this harmony that I see in my family as they dissolve into opposing camps that demand either the Dixie Chicks or more ‘goddamn’ Jimmy Buffett (who may not be particularly ‘country,’ but certainly seems to embrace its spirit). It is a harmony balanced on this very opposition, evident in the amusing juxtaposition between the massive success of country singers who pretend to be down on their luck cowboys (or truckers).

Garth Brooks is always welcome, particularly “Friends in Low Places,” which, in the best sense of the word, is probably our anthem.

I discovered Jason Isbell yesterday when I was just doing my usual distracted thing of skimming the Internet for, I dunno, Godot, I guess. In an article on his sordid history (wandering alcoholic) there was attached a YouTube link to his song, “Travelling Along.” I listened to it and by the time he sang, “And I know every town worth passing through | But what good does knowing do | With no one to show it to,” I was absolutely hooked. He hits that characteristic country lilt in the chorus—that American drawn vowel drawl where the ‘g’ at the end of ‘ing’ is lost—backed by strings, and as he asks that great country question, “Won’t you ride with me?” I was left there wondering who had lured him so: whom was he pining for? The sense of exhaustion, but also hope—that vital aspect of any truly great communicative art that makes the central emotion always suspect to its opposite—captures, to my mind at least, that very moment when loneliness and the pleasures of the isolated, self-sufficient self loses its appeal. The long, clichéd road in country music suddenly demands more than the lone stranger, and the demands of the aware symbol invade the singer who must shift the traditional, lonely—‘I’m no lonesome I could cry’—motif to ask the question, ‘Won’t you ride with me?’ Won’t you, indeed.

“Calendar Days” Dick Diver

How many songs reference ‘TV weeks,’ ‘Zamels’ and ‘TV cop memory’ while using such crystalline phrases like ‘fighter jet’s applause,’ ‘panadol light,’ and ‘the sky is pure appliance white’? Not many, that’s how many.  Time ticks by and everything is covered in a sheen—‘white metal on a wet, black drive,’ ‘bleeding ink on a wet pavement’—as the world continues on its merry way, ‘all calendar days.’ But there is obviously something else beneath all this ‘panadol light’ and ‘appliance white’ clarity: memories that can never quite be evaded; the ‘cassette’ can never be properly rewound to be played again. The yearning of the vocals, not quite balanced against the undistorted electric guitars in the background, and the almost accidental coincidence that they even match melodically to the music, all asserts an uncertainty that carries through as if in a dream where there is only light and the occasional object, but otherwise feels like nothing more than the passing of time. Anything more certain—although what can be more certain than the day-to-day predictability of a calendar?—could not be the singer’s ‘style’: ‘standard time’ slips by.

“Avant Gardener” Courtney Barnett

Apparently she is the IT thing in Melbourne’s music scene at the moment. The nonchalance of this song, its failure to conform to expectations—particularly its avoidance of rhyme in key moments when the listener expects it (my favorite: ‘The paramedic thinks I’m clever cos I play guitar | I think she’s clever cos she stops people dying’)—and the ‘trouble breathing in’ acted out in the apparent trouble of the song to sort of insinuate itself into something familiar in its stinking hot Surreal(ish) world, is what makes it cynically and avant-garde-idly wonderful. The sense is of this world choking, literally, the singer—‘Feel like I’m emphysem-in’’—which I feel is one of those universal feelings one can be suspect to at any time. The exaggeration of the ‘hypochondriac’ she plays herself out to be, who equates ‘asthma puffers’ with ‘smoking bongs,’ defies the ‘mundane’ she mutters she should have, or is, committed to. The irony of the song, then, which sounds laissez-faire in its easy, almost lacklustre delivery that implies a sort of Monday mundane sensation, is that its construction, leading always to trouble ‘breathing in’—whether from the allergy ridden heated air or a bong—is hardly mundane: even in these simple moments of gardening or wandering around in the heat to escape dullness, there is something excitable rushing around the mind or in action, even if it is just the ordinary pressures of the world crushing in.