John Wesley Harding, “Uncle Dad”

His musical name is a pseudonym, borrowed (of course) from a certain R. Zimmerman album, and I know him better as novelist Wesley Stace, with whom I sometimes perform in a folkish cover band that specializes in two-part harmony, and thus he qualifies to be on this nepotistic list. I first met him when he was living in Seattle with a writer friend of mine. He had green hair then. We went out to dinner and he sent me his album from that time Confessions of St. Ace, which I recommend to any lover of songcraft. To me it sounds like a Squeeze album from 1982, which was sort of a great moment for Squeeze, and for songcraft generally. My favorite song was “People Love To Watch You Die,” which I think was, in my interpretation, about how hard it is to continue to perform in public, especially in “mid-career,” the hardest time of any artist’s life. But there were many other great songs on that album (“Goth Girl”) and those albums that followed, which included Adam’s Apple, and the recent Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (this last featuring the excellent “Top of the Bottom”). My favorite Stace compositions have been the world-weary numbers. Because melancholy and undue self-consciousness are not really in his repertoire (he’s a first-rate entertainer, and that’s how he goes about his artistic business), when he bends ever so slightly in those directions (“Sussex Ghost Story,” from Adam’s Apple, e.g) the songs really lift off. I was really lucky, therefore, to hear a composition from among the demos he has on hand (and which he will be recording, I am told, with the Decemberists in the Pacific Northwest sometime later in the year) called “Uncle Dad,” which concerns that most twentieth century of predicaments—the dad who, after the divorce, no longer behaves like a dad. The song may have some resonances with Stace’s own biography. It certainly has some resonances with mine, and with many acquaintances of mine from the seventies. The built-in poignancy here enables him to pursue the material with the vengeance that it deserves, though this is not to say that the song is anything less than the great midtempo pop song with amazing chorus that is Wes’s stock in trade. He likes a big chorus. Perhaps it is the lot of some musicians to be first of all great professionals, and Wes is this. He’s shockingly well-connected (counts Springsteen, Rosanne Cash, Dave Pirner, Tom Robinson, Grant Hart, everyone in R.E.M., the Young Fresh Fellows, and most of the original Throwing Muses as friends), and most people really enjoy spending an evening with him. His music is the same. But it also frequently brushes up against the most lasting greatness, and this song, “Uncle Dad,” as well as others among the recent compositions (“Captain Courageous” is also especially lasting) is an example of the damn-the-torpedoes approach, and it seems like if this is the sort of song he’s recording this fall, and therefore he will be making a really great album, and album that isn’t simply about great songwriting, but is also something emotionally dense and complex and paradoxical, which are moods that have more recently come to the forefront in his novels (Misfortune and By George are the two I have read, but his third has come out in England and is imminent here), moods in which the manifest content and the latent content are at variance, and what seems like mere entertainment is something altogether more painful and dark. I like this sort of thing. I admire it. And so this is what we have to expect from what comes next, at least according to the demos that I have heard—an album of songs eagerly to anticipate.

Other Friends

The Walking Hellos

Other friends include The Walking Hellos, whose two albums (The Walking Hellos and Because I Wanted to Know) I know well of, because The Walking Hellos include Myla Goldberg, the novelist (best known for Bee Season, and a number of other equally great works besides),  and who therefore sit squarely with The Wingdale Community Singers on the ship of Lit Rock. We played with them not long ago, opening for the Golden Palominos on behalf of Electric Literature, and they put on a great show. For me there are not only the voices in the band—most often Myla, but also Rose Thomson, the bass player, and potentially everyone else—there is also the especially amazing drummer, Heather Wagner, who is sort of the feminine analogue for Keith Moon, and the electric guitar player Val Opielski, who plays a double-necked guitar occasionally (the second one is baritone, not twelve-string) and who had the temerity to suggest casually that we, The Wingdales, might play louder. The Walking Hellos do the Pixies-esque loud-soft-loud dynamic variation thing very well, and their lyrics are great. And: Adam Simmons is a wind instrumentalist from Australia, who was ringleader at Music Omi, when Nina Katchadourian and I were there in 2006. He plays jazz, sure, but he plays nearly everything else besides, including noise and new music and punk, and there doesn’t seem to be an instrument on which he doesn’t have proficiency. I can think of few players I know of who are as gifted and as receptive to collaborating and working with other musicians. Though he has played plenty of serious music, he also fields, occasionally, an ensemble called the Adam Simmons Toy Band, whose album Happy Jacket involves a lot of made-in-China plastic geegaws that he must have stolen from his kids’ nursery, but which are, on the recording, employed in completely novel ways. This band is, to my ears, completely sublime. The compositions have a bit of Rahsaan Roland Kirk about them—they aren’t hard bop, they are harmonically accessible jazz pieces, but the soloing is brave and electrifying, and the same is true on Simmons’s most recent album, an album of solos simply entitled Adam Simmons. (One of Simmons’s collaborators on the Toy Band project, I should note, was Nadje Noordhuis, a young trumpeter and flugelhorn player who has also played on a few Wingdales dates. She’s possessed of a most beautiful tone ((and perfect pitch)), and while she hasn’t finished her first album yet, her web site is worth a visit for a few examples of her efforts). And: I want to give the final spot to one of the most spectacular productions I have heard recently, namely Dan Carlson’s album Aviary Jackson, an album of ballads heavily influenced by British pop of the mid-sixties—with a dash of Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson thrown in. The production is by Michael Leonhart, who has worked with Steely Dan and Yoko Ono, etc., and it’s absolutely stunning. Leonhart and Carlson did the arranging, and there are walls of backing vocals, without a hair out of place, and synthesizers burbling in the rear of the acoustic space, and acoustic guitar and piano seated in positions of prominence. The songs are mostly interiors, melancholy and allusive, and the arrangements go a long way toward allowing each to stand out. Also the album makes the most of a couple of uptempo numbers, including the first song (which is nearly a Motown-style single), “The Innocents,” and an almost-dance track composed (it seems to me) from the drums up, “Downtown Again.” Throughout, Carlson’s voice has a Brian Wilson-esque mournfulness, like he’s trying to talk himself into being happier than he really is, but the perfection of the arrangements and the sound of the album prove indisputably that the melancholy of the songs themselves does not lead inevitably to clinical diagnosis. Carlson worked his ass off on the record and it shows. It’s an album made entirely of drive and tenacity, and it’s admirable for this, as well as for its no-hair-out-of-place tonalities. And that does it for a column of embarrassing partisanship for my friends and acquaintances who play music, and this embarrassing duty now discharged, I will return to music by people I know far less of. It’s August, and if you have to bend the rules once in a while, August is when you bend them.

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