And it’s no wonder, really, that Holland has received accolades from megastars like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, proclaiming their love for her bluesy-rootsy-soulful work. Surely, her music must also pierce them with searing loveliness. And force out great big sighs. And then pull them back inside of themselves like it does to the rest of us.

At a young thirty-seven, she has recorded five solo albums and collaborated on many other musical projects since leaving her birthplace, the giant, dusty state of Texas. And it turns out that Holland, whom I met up with for a book-shopping field trip, extracts more than her painfully rich lyrics and musical notes from the cosmos. Amidst her waking hours, which are saturated with songwriting, performing, and work on collaborations like the Portland Cello Project’s recent recording of Beck’s Song Reader, she is also a lover of literature and is currently writing her first book.

“I was a child prodigy, and I was a total freak. I had read most of Shakespeare by the time I was eleven,” says Holland over El Salvadorian food on a gray San Francisco afternoon. “Duke University asked me to write an article for them about gifted children when I was eleven, and I flipped out. I didn’t even show anybody because I had no support for being who I was.”

Who she was, it seems, defied everything her strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing had attempted to mold her into. A voracious reader with a curiosity for all things mystical, Holland moved on from Shakespeare and soon found herself reading novels like Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series by the time she was twelve. Though she was quickly running out of age-appropriate reading material, she felt that writers like C. S. Lewis were “lame.” “I felt like he was talking down to me,” she says. “I didn’t like it. It was way too young-adult for me.”

These days, Holland is mostly interested in reading esoteric stories about voodoo and music, finding inspiration in the works of writer and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, Nigerian folktale writer Amos Tutuola, and even journalist Nick Tosches—though she’s quick to laugh and point out that some feel he objectifies women and that he talks quite a bit about blow jobs.

At some point between her Texas upbringing and today, she found herself doing what every free-thinking young woman does at one point or another: leaving her family and heading west to pursue her art. Holland landed in San Francisco before heading east again, this time to her current home in Brooklyn. She’s busily at work on new songs and a new book, a collection of short stories about the unbelievable, primarily focusing on ghost stories she’s collected through interviews with people from all walks of life.

“My very favorite ghost stories are from people who don’t believe in ghosts,” she says. “But oh dude, when people start talking about orbs and shit, I just blank out. I’m like, ‘Just tell me what happened.’”

Holland draws from the archetypal and analytical teachings of Carl Jung in the retelling of her collected stories, which include an account of writer (and nonbeliever) Rick Moody’s experience with the ghost of Katrina Trask at the infamously haunted Yaddo writers’ residency in Saratoga Springs, New York; a friend’s childhood memories of nightly visits from spirits of Alaska’s native Tlingit culture; and another’s aural experience of an invisible choir in a hotel lobby.

She’s even dabbled in some hands-on research for the book. “I got past-life regression therapy as a part of my research for my book,” she says, “but I didn’t see anything. I think I was kind of scared of my regressionist.” She laughs. “He was an ex-military man, and it kind of freaked me out, like, this guy killed people…’You are getting veeerrry sleepy…’ I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but it scared me.”

None of what Holland shares with me causes alarm. I’m already a little woo-woo myself, and open to most of what our conversation descends into, including Holland’s own past-life dream experiences and stories of haunted houses. Even if I didn’t believe, something about her would convince me to instantly join any cult she’d consider starting.

Still, she says she maintains a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to this project and isn’t concerned about what the nonbelievers—what she refers to as “fundamentalist atheists”—have to say about her lack of scientific evidence for the accounts she shares. She sees most of the tales as beautiful synchronicities. “It doesn’t fit into socialized reality, and that’s all right,” she says. “Who cares?”

Approaching work as an author, she says, is quite different from her experience of songwriting. “Songwriting is really…it is super trancy. It’s really hard to look up from it. You’re totally absorbed. But the thing is [with playing music], I have to wait for my collaborators. I’m on their time a lot of the time. I have to wait for them to get done with the other projects they are doing, and then in the meantime, I can work on the short stories. And they’re short. They are so short. The interview process was more extravagant, and that can take forever.”

Again, I imagine Holland summoning exotic muses, lighting candles, consulting a crystal ball in some New Age-y sacred space in order to create her art. And just when I’m making a mental list of good luck trinkets with which to fill my home office for inspiration, she shocks me. “I finish verses on the subway that I could never finish sitting in front of my piano. I just bring a book, and I bring earplugs, and I can just do it.” On the subway? I’m stunned. “And mopping. I write songs when I’m mopping. So I don’t know—on one hand, I’m like, ‘This is really important, and I shouldn’t be doing housework,’ but it helps sometimes.”

Holland also reminds me that being an artist isn’t as simple as a quick chant of “hocus pocus,” and that there are sacrifices to be made when you decide to dedicate your life to your art. She tells me about double-booking recording sessions and dinner plans—and choosing the music instead of time with old friends. She tells me about her friend, writer Vanessa Veselka, spending five minutes on dates so as to not disrupt her writing schedule. And about another friend who practices guitar eight hours a day, her partner reminding her to eat. Just thinking about it brings on guilty-slacker writers’ block. I just want a magic charm.

“To be an artist, you have to do ridiculous things,” she says. “You have to practice for like eight hours a day—if you want to—or learn how to do really fine-tuned, weird things to develop yourself and that express something about you. But even if you clear the time to write, you don’t know if the gods are going to show up.”

The gods that show up for Jolie these days include Maya Deren, Mikhail Bulgakov, Dante, Zora Neale Hurston, Amos Tutuola, and Blind Willie McTell. She draws heavily on juju from literary figures. The title of her last album, Pint of Blood, references a William S. Burroughs quote, and a new song, tentatively called “Palm Wine Drunkard” after Amos Tutuola’s similarly titled book, is rich with mystical metaphor:

You can drop me off in Limbo on your way to West Hell / I will give your regards to the moon and the stars from the / Bottom of a wishing well

and

Just like a palm wine drunkard playing ghost guitar / I’ma shake you right down and take you right back to the / Place where you already are

I start to wonder about using magic—literally—to help with artistic endeavors. I grow curious about the possibility of selling my own soul for this purpose.

“Only one person I interviewed actually believes that selling your soul to the devil is a real thing,” she says. “He grew up with Townes Van Zandt as his uncle, and he was like, ‘Yeah, Townes sold his soul to the devil. Yup. Absolutely.’ And he meant it in a really specific way. It was super interesting. He said, ‘You can’t do it unless you have kids.’ You have to put the kids’ lives on the line somehow. You have to sacrifice your involvement with their lives for your art, and he also said you’re no good unless you do it.”

I start to wonder how much creativity I could get in exchange for my daughters, and I pause, imagining for a moment that Holland herself has sold her soul to the devil or has a direct link to the gods in order to have so much focus, to create such prolific and deeply moving work. I start wondering if she can also teleport, and if so, I worry that she has witnessed me crumbled in a gruesome heap of tears and snot, sobbing to her albums on the darkest nights of my life. I wonder, too, if the two of us getting so wrapped up in all of this voodoo talk—and therefore never making it to the bookstore as planned (she gave me her list of must-reads, included below)—will lend itself to my re-entering my own trancy, late-night writing magic.

So I ask her. “Did you sell your soul to the devil?”

“I don’t know. My family might say I sold my soul to the devil,” she says with a laugh. “But I don’t have kids, you know. But I did totally blow off my life and my family obligations to kick Jehovah’s Witness ass so I could do this.”

The gods or the devil. Wherever it comes from, whatever helps guide her vision, it’s working. And her fans, believers and nonbelievers alike, should lay a few humble offerings of thanks at their feet.

***

Jolie Holland’s Must-Reads:
In the Hand of Dante, by Nick Tosches
On Celestial Music by Rick Moody
Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Two Years Before The Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
If I Can Cook/You Know God Can by Ntozake Shange

Related Posts:

• Rock Out with Your Book Out #2: Writer Ariel Gore’s Steely Dan Detox
• The Rumpus Interview with John Wesley Harding
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH OLOF ARNALDS
• RECORDS OF YOU

***

Los Lobos is the best live band in the United States of America.

If they were not Chicano, I think, everyone (meaning the white reviewing establishment) would agree with this assessment. And maybe, in the next five or ten years, when they become undeniable elder statesmen (as opposed to just being middle-aged guys) this will be obvious, as it should be.

Having seen them play not long ago at Brooklyn Bowl, courtesy of Jolie Holland (of whom more below), who was sitting in on a couple songs, I was completely transfixed by their greatness. Not only is David Hidalgo surpassingly gifted at everything musical, but the band as a whole is remarkably versatile wherever you look. The bench, as they say, is hugely deep. Which is to say: there were also amazing performances turned in by Cesar Rosas, Louis Perez, and Steve Berlin, each of whom got a moment (or many moments) in the spotlight, and the rhythm section consisting of Conrad Lozano and a charming and hilarious and amazing young drummer whose name I did not get (is he the Cougar Estrada named on the web site?) was brilliant and locked in throughout.

The band is tight, so tight that the word is sort of meaningless, and they can play in any idiom on earth. And the solos, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, were just unfathomable. They played a few covers, and one of these, “One Way Out,” the old blues song made popular by the Allman Brothers, came in the middle of a jam where they got lost for a while. Cesar broke out the riff, and David started singing as though it had been planned all along, and the audience knew all the words.

The show was loose-limbed, funny, beautiful, proud, with just enough anti-professionalism to remind you that they got their start at the edge of the punk scene, and, for those who really care about the intricacies of band life, watching Rosas and Hidalgo work together, two astonishingly inventive players who have given decades to playing on the same stage, amounts to a dynamic live music experience unlike few I have seen in a long while.

The only other band even worth talking about in the same way, in the United States of America, is The Roots. And that band, while astounding, does not have a soloist like this band does. Los Lobos has several great soloists. This show reminded me what I want music to be about, what I want rock and roll to be about. At one time, this approach, this bar-band-touched-with-greatness approach was not unknown. Now is it as rare as, well, wolves in the wild.

***

Can’t Believe The Books Broke Up Already.

I really loved the cut-and-paste project known as The Books. They thought about music in a way that I imagined I very intuitively understood, which is that they mixed laptop grooves with acoustic instruments and very excellent and strange samples. At their best on The Lemon of Pink, their second album, the samples kind of were the verses of their pop songs, though there was no ignoring the essential qualities of the cello in how the songs became as complex sounding and virtuosic as they did. Paul de Jong was a great presence in the music that way. The closer the songs came to songs, the less interested I was, but for all that there was still something deeply surprising and new about The Books throughout their brief life, even on the somewhat sad and riven last album, The Way Out.

Most laptop music skews toward dance. The Books did not. They were surprisingly devoted to the samples as samples, but the acoustic part of the of thing often had a paradoxically Appalachian flavor (and that’s appropriate since, if I am not misinformed, Nick Zammuto was actually hiking the Appalachian trail at one point while they were working on an album).

Eventually, I guess, there was bad blood between Zammuto and de Jong, or at least aesthetic disagreement, and the collaboration was no more. It’s always depressing when this happens in bands you like, when there is Mould vs. Hart, or Simon vs. Garfunkel, or Reed vs. Cale, or Davies vs. Davies, or Gallagher vs. Gallagher, or Lennox vs. Stewart, or what have you. Time is the avenger, and all good collaborations untimely come to an end, through death or entropy.

Still, there is a very interesting box set out, now, of everything The Books released, entitled A Dot in Time, and it’s a limited edition type of thing. Totally worth pursuing it seems to me, and especially because the primary format in this case seems to be the LP, with lots of extras, a DVD, and a USB drive, so you can have all the tracks that way too. It’s sad to lose a band that seems at the height of its powers (only four studio albums into its career), but the box set is a fine record of what they did, and, I think, they lasted as long as The Clash.

***

You Cannot Deny that Recent Single by the Beach Boys.

Look, I understand that there are ways that the reunion version of the Beach Boys bears no resemblance to the Beach Boys, I know that significant members of the Beach Boys are no longer living, in particular Carl Wilson, whose singing is sorely missed, and I know that Brian Wilson is in his seventies, and I know that it is hard to admit to yourself that rock and roll is now best practiced by people in their seventies, that whatever this idiom is, it is now often performed by people who qualify for Medicare and Social Security, and I know, further, that there is a guitar break in this song, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” that is borrowed from Toto, undeniably so, and I know that almost anything that involves Mike Love, who I believe once referred to “Good Vibrations” as “avant-garde shit,” involves surface affability in a baffling and irritating way, I know all of this. And I know that this is more the band that recorded “Kokomo” than it is the band that recorded “California Girls.” Which means that “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the single, cannot possibly be good.

I further believe that digital recording is the enemy of the Beach Boys, because it makes vocals that were beautiful in a natural way sound as processed and auto-tuned as anything you might here on the “radio” these days. And there are too many session musicians playing on the song. And the lyric rhymes “when I” with “antennae.” All true.

Why then is it so good? Or if not good exactly why does it get under your skin somehow? I can’t think of many singles that I have loved in the last decade. I am not the sort of person who listens to a single. I listen to a body of work. I listen to a career. The kind of “radio” I like is the kind that plays a lot of deep catalogue, or which ignores everything happening in contemporary music. I like the radio that consists of all possible musics. But I can’t seem to let go of this song right now, and while “That’s Why God Made the Radio” is frankly nostalgic in a way I am suspicious of—as is the entire album of the same name—there is something that is very moving about the fact of this music, about its anti-rock qualities, its anti-contemporary qualities. I think it has to do with the fact that concerns about adulthood are addressed therein—getting older, recollection, grief—in a way that is just not possible in a musical market that concentrates entirely on instantaneity.

But that’s not all. One thing seems to remain of Brian Wilson, that genius, and that is a relationship to the complex possibilities of harmony. And at this point his idea of harmony, whose roots are in harmonies from the 1950s, in chromaticism, is so unusual as to be completely singular, and totally American. Even on a song like “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which apparently dates back more than a decade, and which is nothing like the beautiful and reflective songs that end the album (a sort of a suite—“From There to Back Again,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” and “Summer’s Gone”), there is on offer a half-century or more of ideas about harmony. This is something that almost no one else in American music is capable of. Only Brian Wilson.

“That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the song, is mostly a frothy opportunity for a big out-chorus, in which just about everyone still alive in the Beach Boys family sings. All those voices. Why wouldn’t this be beautiful? There is the joy of these artists singing again. The fact of this joy. But more than that there is the joy of hearing all of American music for nearly sixty years distilled, summarized, and even, yes, advanced a bit.

“That’s Why God Invented Spotify” would be a more likely single these days, but what we actually have here, a middle-aged hymn to a dead medium, is far more interesting.

***

I know that Scott McCaughey is a sophisticated musician, with great talent, and an arresting array of projects and interests, all of them of surpassing musical interest, e.g., The Baseball Project, and The Minus 5, R. E. M., etc., but apparently I like the stuff that he whips off with one arm behind his back, the most elemental part of his output, viz., the Young Fresh Fellows, who now have another album out, called Tiempo De Lujo (Yep Roc), which they recorded in some alarmingly short amount of time that would be measured in days not weeks.

I hold my breath with excitement about new YFF albums, which means that I am frequently blue with oxygen deprivation because the albums do not arrive very often anymore. I think there have been three in the last decade, and this new one therefore arrives almost hurriedly, because there was a really good one just a couple of years ago (I Think This Is, 2009).

Tiempo De Lujo does not quite have the varnish of compositional premeditation that I Think This Is had, but who gives a shit? What’s good about a YFF album is the awesome camaraderie of the thing (McCaughey and Jim Sangster and Tad Hutchison have been playing together for about thirty years, and Kurt Bloch, the newcomer, is now at the 25-year-mark), and the thrill of reverently pilfered decades of rock and roll, and the excellence of the rhythm session (Sangster is a remarkably melodic bass player, and drummer Hutchison is a force for chaos, but in the best possible way), and Kurt Bloch’s great solos, and McCaughey’s made-them-up-just-now lyrics; look, there are a lot of bands who put a lot of hard work into what they do, and they have shit to show for it, and this band just turns on its incendiary enthusiasms when they feel like hanging out, and the results are incredibly winning and far more reverent than they appear to be at first blush. This is the kind of thing that makes rock and roll mean something again. Perhaps this album was not premeditated, but it has a lot of living in it, and it’s funny as hell, totally punk, and just as in-your-face as The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, the first YFF album from 1984, and it mentions Dr. Zizmor.

The Young Fresh Fellows are just as good as when they were legitimately young and fresh, in fact, they are more great, because they don’t need to make a career of this. They only need the joy, and there’s plenty of that on Tiempo De Lujo.

***

I’ve already said everything I can possibly say about Jolie Holland, but that would mean that I wouldn’t get a chance to write about her cover of “Rex’s Blues,” by Townes Van Zandt, which is on her most recent album, Pint of Blood (Anti-).

You can listen to the album version here, and that version is accompanied by piano and violin, i.e., Holland playing everything, and with a sort of sprung rhythm wherein the accompaniment really is accompaniment—the voice is the leading edge of the thing, and the piano just fills in around it. As a player of the fiddle, Holland is absolutely sublime, absolutely sublime. There is no fiddle player in contemporary music who touches her. Only Carla Kihlstedt reaches these heights, and she comes from the conservatory world. Holland originates from her own special hideout, and so there is no one quite like her. But by describing the waves of trembling fiddle I fail—as I am bound to do—to describe the emotional punishment of this song, and this is what I must attempt. The lyric starts likes this:

Ride the blue wind high and free
She’ll lead you down through misery
Leave you low, come time to go
Alone and low as low can be

If I had a nickel I’d find a game
If I won a dollar I’d make it rain
If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry
And lay me down dissatisfied

The lyric doesn’t get any less dark thereafter—it is never a good old time. Everybody knows what happened to Townes Van Zandt, and his version of the song (probably the best version, or the least unfussy, is on Live at the Old Quarter), his rendition of the devastation and self-slaughter, takes a stridently impassive approach to the subject matter. He’s just telling you how it is. Holland means something entirely other. For one thing, Holland makes the melody count. It’s a beautiful melody, but Van Zandt plays it as a country song, while Holland is a lot closer to gospel. Gospel, to these ears, is more appropriate, musically, because you can kind of live in the melody a little bit, but gospel is more appropriate thematically because Holland, by slowing the whole thing down and contributing some wordless runs between the verses, accepts the self-slaughter and cares about it, whereas Van Zandt just indicates the likelihood that such things happen, of which he was exhibit A. Van Zandt sings “Rex’s Blues” like Hank Williams, which means that he sings it like someone who is going to die. Van Zandt sings it in both the third and first person (he’s singing about Rex, but he’s singing as Rex). But Holland sings it in the third, the first, and the third (she’s singing about Rex, she’s singing as Rex, she’s singing about Van Zandt), which means she has more layers, and while Van Zandt’s recording is sympathetic with Rex, it is not compassionate, because compassion is not a country music virtue (compassion is unmasculine), but Holland solves the problem by being a woman, and by using the gospel idiom to moor her compassion. Is there a first-person layer to Holland’s transcription? Is she singing about herself too? You could make the argument, which would mean it would have yet another layer, as in this verse:

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly
Eyes to laugh and lips to cry
A restless tongue to classify
All born to grow and grown to die

Which is perhaps partly about lost love, and so perhaps there is a love-love dimension to Holland’s recording. Which gives it at least four possible readings. Probably my favorite line in the whole is this “restless tongue to classify.” Did Van Zandt mean what he seems to mean? It’s an indictment of language, and the tendency of language (after Aristotle) to prove and ratify taxonomy above all, and in that business of differences, to endanger the speaker, to make the speaker a subject of language, and to feel in that paradox (the speaker is the subject rather than the speaker) an annihilation—a hard line to sing, in a deeply grim verse, but Holland seems to sing it with its full force. Maybe a line about epistemology in a verse about lost love all makes some kind of peculiar sense. At least it does in Holland’s recording.

All of this is to say: I think Jolie Holland’s rendition of the song is better than Van Zandt’s. Holland embodies and purges the horror of this lyric, by making the thing more compassionate, and Van Zandt wasn’t a legend as a singer anyway (and we are used to the notion, in the era of Bob Dylan, that good singing is an impediment). He was a writer first. And herein is a remarkable development. There is no other singer in the “indie rock” world who is an effective interpreter of songs. There are others who occasionally cover a song (Bonny “Prince” Billy covers songs exceedingly well sometimes), but there is no one who has that incredibly effective ability to interpret, the way, viz., Karen Dalton did, the way Nina Simone did. Holland has that kind of interpretive talent. She dashes off interpretations (I have been lucky enough to hear some of them) sometimes without thinking twice, though her instrument is so singular, so unusual that wherever she concentrates it, there is magic. You can see how she even reinterprets her own interpretations, by watching her revisit “Rex’s Blues” here, for guitar accompaniment:

Pint of Blood is otherwise originals, and Jolie Holland is a remarkable writer, too, but it takes time for originals to register, to reach their full flower. (Which is why I’m writing about a record that came out 15 months ago.) Interpretations have their impact more quickly, if the tune is familiar. “Rex’s Blues,” while not well known outside of Townes Van Zandt circles, has that familiar feeling, a melody we should have known already. And Jolie Holland makes it even more important, more indelible than it was before.

And the last thing I’ll say about this is: I was listening to “Rex’s Blues” while writing notes about the Purgatorio of Dante recently. And I loved how the second verse of the song, with its water imagery (“If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry”) cohered with this marvelous passage in the Purgatorio, from Canto V (Mandelbaum translation):

You are aware how, in the air, moist vapor
will gather and again revert to rain
as soon as it has climbed where cold enfolds.
His evil will, which only seeks out evil,
conjoined with intellect; and with the power
his nature grants, he stirred up wind and vapor.
And then, when days was done, he filled the valley
from Patomagno far as the great ridge
with mist; the sky above was saturated.
The dense air was converted into water;
rain fell, and then the gullies had to carry
whatever water earth could not receive;
and when that rain was gathered into torrents,
it rushed so swiftly toward the royal river
that nothing could contain its turbulence.

Turns out Jolie Holland knows her Dante, too, and I’m not ruling out the possibility that she knows there is a connection between the fluvial imagery in Van Zandt’s underworld, as interpreted by Holland, and Dante’s purgatory.

***

Marcia Bassett is not a noise guitarist, because among other things the word “noise” when applied to music is incredibly stupid, where music is concerned it is a remarkably unuseful word.

Marcia Bassett, whom I only met a few weeks ago despite the fact that we are in the same Dante study group, is also known as Double Leopards, or at least formerly was, on occasion, and also records as Zaimph, and was, on this night that I heard her, playing with violinist Samara Lubelski, who has also played with Thurston Moore, among many others.

Things came out of Bassett’s guitar that are not supposed to come out of any guitar, and the relationship between the guitar and the violin (which also had a lot of pedals and mischief going on) was sublime. They played for half an hour for so, one song, improvised entirely (as far as I can tell), with no breaks, no commentary, and so on. This was, it’s worth saying, incredibly feminine music somehow, though abstract. It was graceful, calm, without being sentimental, abstract without being stupidly abstract, and there was no boyish self-centeredness. It was just remarkably beautiful music that sometimes sounded like a train, sometimes like an earthquake, sometimes like a siren passing in the street, and sometimes like a mouse climbing over the surface of an autoharp. Or sometimes it sounded like a hamster on a wheel. Or sometimes it sounded like an Ed Wood sound effect. There were collisions of melody, where you least expected it, and these were delicate and inviting, not Wagnerian.

So where would the noise part of the thing occur, if it is as I’m saying? Somehow, we have all come a long way from the days when noise was noise, which means: we tolerate a lot of dissonance, and we tolerate a lot of things that would have bugged us in the old days, explicitly non-musical sounds, and so on. These things sound beautiful, which is why Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski’s performance was beautiful, even though it was not sentimental, and was never obvious.

After Marcia, at Union Pool on the night in question, was Alvarius B., formerly known as Alan Bishop, formerly of the Sun City Girls (and co-founder of the awesome Sublime Frequencies label), one of the really great and interesting bands of the nineties (and they did, in fact, record an album called Dante’s Disneyland Inferno, which I am trying to scare up at the moment), and his performance was so stylized, provocative on purpose, deliberately nasty, and also rather sublime, all at once. And this morning I thought of him as one of the somewhat redeemed tyrants, sitting in the valley, surround by flowers that are more beautiful than precious metals, namely Marcia’s performance. He is still untrustworthy, slightly terrifying, highly moving, while Marcia, in the difficult opening act was full of compassion for him before he had even done what what he was going to do.

***

Owen Ashworth must have been reading Raymond Carver.

I knew about Casiotone for the Painfully Alone over the years, Ashworth’s first band, knew people who loved them without reserve, and I always understood the mix of British New Wave and Phil Spector and Suicide (the band) and incredibly bleak lyrics, but somehow I personally didn’t feel as painfully alone as the music required. (Which is not to say that I didn’t feel painfully alone on occasion.) I suppose I wasn’t ready. What would help me turn the corner? Seeing Owen play live, which I recently did at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

This show was sort of a testament to the power of live music for me, for the following reasons: 1) Ashworth played a Fender Rhodes electric piano live throughout the show, and it sort of trumped the synthetic qualities of the Casiotone recorded work. Though you may think Ashworth doesn’t do anything but write the lyrics, and the machines do the rest, there is sophisticated melodic thinking going into those parts, and by paring away almost everything except the Fender Rhodes for the show, he reveals the music inside of the conceptual apparatus. And 2) by doing so he makes the drum machine seem less in control. The drum machine patterns he likes, which are really simple and uninflected (and the drum machine he likes is seriously old-fashioned and primitive), are something to work against in the live setting, and I loved every minor imperfection of entrance and exit, or the moments where he’d stop the song and then have to turn off the drum machine at the same time, it was where all the robust humanism of the songs started to leak out at the edges, and 3) he was a little bit nervous (opening for the excellent Mark Kozelek), and the nervousness made his voice, which is a blunt force instrument, even a bit more plangent, because he wobbled a bit at first, and, 4), perhaps most importantly there’s something about singing these songs to people as opposed to singing them in the privacy of your own home that requires a certain commitment. Yes, Ashworth’s songs are about a failure to communicate or about failure to reap all the rewards of contemporary life, and when you sing about these things to people, and people respond with a fair amount of warmth (as was the case here in the mostly staid neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn), it gives the whole thing a little bit of veneer of, well, redemption.

Moreover, there are some facts, in this new Ashworth regime called Advance Base, that make the whole a little triumphant. What’s with the name change? Why no more Casiotone for the Painfully Alone? Because, perhaps, Ashworth is no longer painfully alone himself. Because, perhaps, Ashworth is now a father, among other things, and being in the enviable position of someone who knows someone who knows him, I got to chat with him briefly after the show, and we traded kid stories. And I got to see a couple of pictures of Rosalie, his daughter. A very moving moment, and you could hear, in the conversation, how some of Ashworth’s natural skepticism about this mess that is human relations has given way, a little bit, to some excitement and even significant joy about parenting. Advance Base, then, might refer to the advanced accomplishment of not writing songs about the failure to connect in your studio on headphones, quiet enough that no one else can hear.

There’s something celebratory about this new Owen Ashworth, who, it must be said, is an incredibly sweet guy on first impression. The simplicity of the music and the absolute refusal either to compromise, or to worry especially about vocal delivery, do make Ashworth sound like Leonard Cohen, a little bit, a contemporary analogue, wherein even untoward showoffiness in the area of lyrics is de trop, but if you bear down on the Ashworth lyrics, which are all 7-11s and television shows and shitty American car models and bad holiday dinners, the aesthetic to me is just as artful as Cohen, only more minimalist-realist, as if he spent all his formative years reading Carver or Frederick Barthelme. I admire these lyrics so much. I wish I were this good as lyricist.

And then there’s one last point worth making and that is for all his wobbly sentimental/anti-sentimental vulnerability and his refusal to appear unduly professional in his recordings, Ashworth is also poised and committed about what he does, happy to be there, totally present for his vision, or so it appears, and this is at some variance with the serotonin deprivation of work, but totally winning. He’s a big, bearded, lion of a guy, and he appears to love making music, which makes it easy to love him.

***

And I tried to understand the Taylor Swift phenomenon this morning, but I do not understand.

I get that it is considered inhumane or bad form to say that music that breaks all sales records has no redeeming merit whatsoever. I remember those icy and condescending ripostes by Kelefa Sanneh about how the rock audiences were irrelevant to where music was in the middle oughts, and I’m sure he would say something laudatory, as one of his colleagues at the New Yorker has done, about how pure and confident and American Taylor Swift is, but I just want to say, it is not that I want to like things that are obscure or unpopular, it’s that the things that are heavily machined by the digital processing of the day (and few things are more heavily machined than, e.g. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again,” her new single) sound utterly dead to me, like some flattened squirrel on a country road. Or these songs actually do sound to me like what the undead would sing if they were capable of singing.

I know that Robert Christgau, and others, have bent over backward to try to find something redeeming to say about Taylor Swift, like that she has a real knack with a chorus, and she tells us true things about what teenage girls or young women really feel, as though she were the Lena Dunham of the pop world (which she is not), but I remember all of that faux-confessionality from Jagged Little Pill, and from Natalie Imbruglia, and one summer’s bold and true lyrics are next summer’s post-menopausal antiques. I defy you to sing the words “Isn’t It Ironic?” without being ironic. And what about: “I’m all out of faith/and this is how I feel.” By Natalie Imbruglia? Feeling good about that one now? So I find the allegedly refreshing and honest lyrics of Taylor Swift repellant and artificial, as if thought up by a middle-aged Swedish guy with a coke and Ritalin problem, and if I had to listen to them for long I would probably have to run screaming form the room.

I respect Taylor Swift’s ability to steal from every available popular form of the moment, viz., “country” and pop and hip hop and electronica, but there is nothing in this music that does anything new besides fusing together a mandolin with a programmed drum track, and so I say it is inert, like the flattened squirrel, manufactured, ungenuine, and when we are forced to listen to two or three more of these albums, we will, as people do with relentlessness generally, begin to form a hard impenetrable exoskeleton to the work of Taylor Swift, and we will begin to hate it deeply (those of us who didn’t hate it already), and we will say horrible things about it and about her. This will not matter, because her parents work in finance, and she has good manners, and she’s going to marry up, and she’s going to get into the movies (not just guest appearances in CSI), and she’s going to launch some clothing lines at Target (no, wait, I think she already did that), and a personal fragrance (I think she did that too), and parlay all her bad press into some self-serious complaints, making good on every opportunity to monetize her career at the expense of making actual art.

Look, I normally only write about things I like, things I care about, but I can’t stop myself here. Taylor Swift represents what makes me want to die about popular music. She makes me want to die. If it’s all going to be like this—merchandising opportunities, branding, cross-platforming–the marble slab of post-mortality, then I am not interested in popular music. I don’t give a fuck. Taylor Swift makes music about as interesting as Olestra-based products, or Swiffers in multiple colors, or tiered Jell-O dessert products, or milk from China that has lead in it, or home cosmetic surgery, or rectal bleaching. Her publicists are adept at creating an ersatz Taylor Swift who appears to resemble a young woman with hauntingly insistent nostrils. But that does not mean that she is not a Swedish Ritalin-addict’s idea of the popular song, created by committee for demographic penetration. More than a million people bought her album in the first week. And every one of them was duped.

***

Oh, and I never did finish the Universal Thump interview I was going to do.

I cherish both Greta Gertler and Adam Gold, the principal players in this band, the Universal Thump, and truly admire their first full-length album (more here), especially for its arrangements which are extremely lovely and ornate, but they are shy and busy, and are in Australia getting married, and I don’t like pestering people, so here’s all we got so far, which was entirely from Greta’s point of view. Read a few lines, and then go and buy some of their songs. You’ll be glad you did.

Q: Can you describe the early history of Universal Thump? How did you meet? Was love always a feature in the music? Did love precede the music? How were the two integrated?

A: In July 2008, I asked Adam Gold if he’d play drums with me at a show at Barbes. I had previously had a tuba-rock band called The Extroverts, which had imploded for various reasons. Before that I performed solo under my own name, with a lot of different musicians. Adam and I had been friends for a few years, having met through mutual friends who are musicians too. We had always wanted to collaborate, musically. Adam is an incredible and very supportive musician and I’d always been so impressed with his work, particularly in the band Moore & Sons. But it just hadn’t worked out for us to work together until that fateful Barbes gig.

I scheduled a rehearsal with the band a week or so before the gig. I knew I’d always liked Adam a great deal as a friend, unconditionally. But fairly quickly after that rehearsal I fell completely in love with him (not just his drumming). The two – love and music – were pretty closely integrated from that time on. Many songs I wrote on the album are inspired by that time in 2008 – by our getting closer and also going through periods of separation. And the process of beginning “The Universal Thump” was enabled by our love for each other. Prior to that time, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to make another album. I did have a collection of songs that I had written that hadn’t been recorded, and there seemed to be forming a body of work that I really wanted to record, but I was feeling pretty bleak about making another record. Adam suggested we try it, and was so supportive of doing it that we began working on it in his studio, Oh Real Yum.

We also went on a whale-watching trip to Canada around that time – an adventure that we had together very early in our relationship, which inspired the process of trying to find the sound and the shape of the album together. We began by gathering ‘field recordings’ of sounds we were hearing, and imagining them intertwined within a sparse landscape of instruments. But the album gradually grew into a more ambitious orchestral pop album with over 60 musicians. I don’t think either of us realized that the album would take four years to complete, and we’ve gone through ups and downs with working on it so closely together. It’s been important for us to take breaks from the recording process. But I feel that ultimately working together on it has brought us closer. I’m really very proud of it.

Q: Can we go back slightly and talk about why you weren’t sure you wanted to make another album at the time that Universal Thump began? Just the vicissitudes of the music business? Did it have to do with working in NYC as opposed to in your ancestral homeland of Australia?

A: At the time that The Universal Thump began I was still somewhat recovering from the break-up of my previous band, The Extroverts. As the name suggests, there were certain strong personalities and dynamics within that band, that both made it exceptionally fun and raucous, and also prone to implosion. The rhythm section comprised of tuba and marching drums, there were two electric guitarists and me on Wurlitzer and vocals. We rehearsed, performed and recorded together in NYC for two years. We made a great record – “Edible Restaurant” – which really captures the live, theatrical sound of the band. It was the first time I’d managed to gather a steady band together in NYC, which was quite difficult as everyone was so busy and had numerous other musical projects. But it was something I’d always wanted. In the end, there was one too many “tuba tantrums” and we had to part ways. After channelling so much energy, passion and drive into that project, I was somewhat wary of heading down another collaborative venture, especially with someone that I was beginning a relationship with.

Aside from all of that, yes, the vicissitudes of the music business were also getting me down, after putting my songs out there as a solo artist, with The Extroverts and generally pounding the pavements of NYC for several years. Without any label, management or other music industry backing, it all gets a bit overwhelming…  I guess my way of dealing with that disappointment was to express it as a fear of making another record. But honestly, I’m too addicted to making albums to ever stop. And, whether or not Adam and I were in a relationship, I had always wanted to collaborate with him musically. I have unconditional and unlimited respect for and trust in his musical talents, and I was thrilled honored that he wanted to work on an album with me . . .

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

***

The Rumpus: You’re originally from Houston. You often draw on folk and other traditional forms of music with regional or geographical roots. How have the different places you’ve lived informed what you do as a musician?

Jolie Holland: I love Chinese music. It’s awesome when I get to hear it live on a regular basis. I used to live in LA, and I got to see the Chinese orchestra play there. I live in New York now, and there’s this one erhu player I see on the subway every once in a while when I go through Chinatown. He blows my mind, he’s so beautiful. I’m really into the different ways people all over the world resolve a musical phrase, but I do what’s culturally appropriate for me. I don’t even know where Appalachia is, and I don’t know if I’m necessarily influenced by Appalachian music. There’s so much music in Texas. There’s so much music from the Gulf Coast. It’s the musical estuary of America, and there’s no getting around that. But it’s not folk music in a certain way. You can’t write it off with an anthropological label. I remember growing up and hearing Cajun music on the radio and so many different flavors of swing and hip-hop and stuff from all over the place, and then all the Mexican music, which is so killer.

Rumpus: As a singer-songwriter, you play in a genre that draws on traditional music, and yet you also play in a genre that values innovation. Do you feel like you belong to a particular tradition, or do you find those distinctions superfluous?

Holland: I don’t want to assume something is real if it’s not. I don’t want to say I am part of something I’m not part of. That would be obnoxious. One thing I believe will answer your question, and it answers the question for me, is that every single living hero of mine, without me having to look for them, has contacted me and told me they liked my stuff. That includes Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Michael Hurley, Mavis Staples. To me, that says however you want to think about it, I am part of some tradition.

Rumpus: Can you talk about your songwriting process? Some of your songs, like “Sweet Girls,” play on turns of phrase. Some, like “Remember,” seem more narrative. When you write a song, where do you start? When you start writing, do you have a sense of how it’s going to sound at the end of the process?

Holland: The normal thing for me is to write a song in my head—music and lyrics both—because that way the song is not tied to the constraints of an instrument. A song like “Springtime Can Kill You” really shows its roots in that sense because it’s a pretty difficult melody to sing. I didn’t think about that when I wrote it. Some of my friends who are great singers have said, “I can’t even sing that.” When I wrote it, I let the melody lead, and I had to establish what the roots were. I had to learn how to play it, and then I had to teach the band how to play it, which was fun. I did write the rhythm. I guess that’s what comes first for me. The lyrics don’t come first, and the ideas are always cooking in their own way—I’m always being my own sous chef about concept and structure—but really, the rhythm comes first, which is why it’s important for me to work with a creative and sensitive drummer.

Rumpus: You’ve been referred to as a confessional songwriter. How would you describe your relationship to your characters?

Holland: I love songwriting and poetry that’s totally, embarrassingly personal. That doesn’t have anything to do with me; I like it when I read other people’s stuff like that. When I started writing songs, it didn’t occur to me to not write that way because that’s what I like. That’s what I like about any art form, awareness of the human mechanism; that’s where the good stuff is. I never feel like any of it is too personal. If I think I may have gotten to that line in some songs, I don’t release those songs. Sometimes you know more in the act of doing the work than you do with your regular conscious mind. That’s true for a lot of songwriters and writers in general and other types of artists. I’ve had songs out me about stuff I was unaware of, and I decided not to release those songs, even though I thought it was good work in there.

Rumpus: Do you work to a schedule? Do you have particular habits or disciplines?

Holland: I’m a writer, and I think a good rule for me as a writer is to wake up, make coffee, and write, either hang out at the piano with the coffee, or hang out with the computer and work on the book. But that’s not how I write songs. The way I write songs is, I make them force me to write them. I was going through some super rough personal life shit a while ago, and these songs would come to me and try to get written. I would tell them to fuck off because I didn’t want to write them. I didn’t want any person outside myself to be attached to those songs and want to hear them. I don’t normally push songs away that hard. But it was amazing because the songs would come back in complete form. They would come harass me, and I’d be like, I know that fucking melody, you can fuck right off. Eventually, I think they moved on. They’re going to go pick on somebody else. I hope so. Actually, I don’t hope so. It’s some sad shit.

Rumpus: Do you take notes and write things down while you’re walking around out in the world?

Holland: I send myself text messages. I call myself, and I have a little book I write things in. I use a Moleskin for a wallet. It’s got a little pack in the back where I stick money or a Metro card, and then, in the rest of it, I can scribble things to myself. I’m not very disciplined. I don’t really try to write songs. I haven’t tried to write songs since I was 14, and I thought the songs I tried to write sucked, so I got intothis different method, which is kind of like fishing. I’d be interested to see what it would be like to try to write songs. I have a sly, backwards way of trying to write songs now. I’m always thinking about structure and form, and then whenever the emotional material shows up, it might or might not fit into any of the available ideas I’ve been thinking about. It’s not a forced thing. I’m just constantly interested in structure.

Rumpus: You mean song structure?

Holland: I like to notice how a song works. A lot of times, the songs I’m writing will have a completely improvised structure, like “Tender Mirror.” I didn’t think about the structure while I was writing it; it came through pretty much in that form. You could say there’s an A and a B section, and it doesn’t go back. It’s all in the same key, and there’s a refrain. I also like to think about the psychological structure of songs, like the song I wrote, “Sweet Loving Man,” is based on this one Memphis Minnie song I heard a long time ago where it’s really conversational, but you can’t tell what the people are talking about.

Rumpus: Your new record has been described as having a loose, organic feel. Were the songs fleshed out before you went into the studio, or were you still writing them when you started recording? To what extent does the process of recording become part of the songwriting process?

Holland: I don’t ever walk into the studio without songs being completely written because I can’t afford to do that. I’m not interested in writing on the spot. Some people do, and I think that’s cool. Kyp Malone, my good friend, who’s in TV on the Radio, loves writing in the studio. I think that suits his type of music better than mine. The way he approaches structure is really different than the way I do, so it can work for him. For me, it’s much more of a quiet process, and I don’t want to be under pressure when I’m doing that. As for the looseness, I think that’s a collective hallucination because this is the only record I’ve ever done that was predominately to a click.

Rumpus: You mean a metronome click?

Holland: Yeah. We didn’t use it on every song, but we did on most of the songs, and I think the presence of a totally steady rhythm allows people to hear my rhythmic improvisation in the singing because I wasn’t listening to the click; just the drummer was. It was in Shazad Ismaily’s headphones. Also, there are so many terrible writers that are just copying each other. They don’t really have strong opinions, and they don’t know what they’re talking about, so the word loose might be partly from the telephone game, and then also the hallucination created by using a click track.

Rumpus: How much improvisation do you and Shazad do in the studio? The two of you play just about all the instruments except for another guitar player, right?

Holland: Yeah. Grey Gersten was the third most represented player. A great deal of it was improvised, though we were aware of the structure. That’s what it’s like with the kind of music I play. Everybody knows the structure, but what you do inside the structure is always open to how you feel in the moment.

Rumpus: In the promo stuff I’ve read, you said the recording was done in the studio and also in private spaces. Did you also record at home?

Holland: Shazad and I cut a couple tracks in our homes. On “Tender Mirror,” that’s my piano. We cut “Wreckage” at his house. The equipment he has is nicer than what you find in 90 percent of the commercial studios around the country, so it wasn’t inferior recording quality.

Rumpus: Hearing the album, it feels like you’re hanging out in the studio with the band. I don’t know a better word for it than vibe.

Holland: That’s great. That’s what I’m always going for, and I thought the working environment of this record was particularly sweet.

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I bought Escondida because I liked Jolie Holland on “Lakes of Pontchartrain” and “The Littlest Birds,” from Blue Horse, the Be Good Tanyas album, and because I had read rapturous reviews of Holland’s solo work. And, indeed, I liked certain songs on Escondida, especially “Darlin’ Ukulele,” and “Amen,” although I found some of the genre exercises that filled out the album a little specialized. Since Escondida was not something that I put on the stereo relentlessly, I kind of dawdled on the next album, Springtime Can Kill You. Didn’t buy it immediately. Until a friend with particularly excellent taste (the friend who also turned me on to The Lemon of Pink, by the Books, another spectacularly good album), sent me “Mexican Blue.” I can’t even remember why she sent it to me, and I can’t remember why because no one remembers what’s happening on the day before they learn of the hurricane, that’s just some ordinary day, with trips to the dry cleaners, or to get the muffler is repaired; I confess I didn’t know if I was going to love “Mexican Blue,” that first time I played it, because I didn’t know if there was more to Jolie Holland than my admiration for her talent and for her caginess, her refusal to pander to the audience or to play up her spot in front of the lights. These are good things—talent, smarts—but these things had not yet enlightened me. And what I want, in the end, is that my heart should be compelled in some way, because like most people I am in the condition of almost routine absence from life, unable to see it as it is, and unable to have the requisite gratitude, and I am almost always noticing my own failures where my relationships are concerned, letting them pass me by until something dire comes along, until the hurricane comes along again, hovers briefly before alighting on the coast of me with a vengeance, whereupon I am watching shit blow out to sea, and it’s then that I see how loss is about the only feeling that I am absolutely certain I understand, and it’s only when I feel the loss is stirred up like the bilge in a basement that I start to feel again, and such was my experience of “Mexican Blue,” that it called up to me from the land of failure, the land of people who do nothing but fuck up with the ones they love, and who can’t seem to participate in the tiered Jell-O dessert of ordinary life, and almost instantly, upon hearing its unfurling of verses, I was reduced to some torrential downpour of loss, or a recognition of loss, and this has been my experience of the song since, which is, I suppose, four years of experience now, except for the times when I won’t allow myself to listen to it, because it is too painful to listen to, or because I just love it too much, and I don’t want to be made insulated, and don’t want to think that this much compassion (Jolie Holland’s kind of compassion, as evinced in the song) can somehow be expended by overuse. So I have had possession of this song four years or so, I have possessed the file as well as the album, and I have played it intermittently, because masterpieces should stay masterpieces, though as the song itself says: Everything is so much better when you are around.

You will be asking, what is so good about this song? You have described the effect upon yourself of the song, and you have described it in terms of an Atlantic storm (category four or category five), but you have not elucidated what is so good about the song itself, and now I mean to do just that, and first I will attempt to detail the musical portion of the composition, and then I will move on to touch upon the words. (Read the lyrics here.)

It’s a piano ballad, primarily, which means that it begins at the piano, played with utmost simplicity (I’ll try to sing it pure and easily), and I suppose this is Holland herself, because she is credited with piano on the album, and we get a couple of verses of just voice and piano, and the piano part is some modification of the “Let It Be” chord progression, the one banged out by the pianistically challenged Paul McCartney, and never once does the song deviate from this repetition of four chords, and I suspect, as with Holland’s guitar playing, that this repetition is owing to rudimentary skills, but that is fine; and yet if you are never once going to vary the progression of chords, you had better have some tricks up your sleeve as regards arrangements, some tricks in the area of dynamics, and one such example we have here, in “Mexican Blue,” is the glockenspiel, or maybe it’s a celeste, some bells at any rate, and they come in after the line They said they’d started to get worried about me, they were happy we had finally met, we had finally met. Also some drums, and some very tasteful electric guitar (a sort of twangy, Byrds-ish guitar part), and bass, these just blocking out the chord progression, really, the accompaniment is somewhere to go, in the same way that the drums come in on “Tangled Up In Blue.” And perhaps “Tangled Up In Blue” is one model for “Mexican Blue,” Dylan’s song being an epic about a relationship, one that, he once said, took him ten years to write. Similarly, here, the drums are just somewhere to go, but the glockenspiel is an adornment both austere and playful, in exactly the way that Holland’s Texan accent, with its ludicrous vowels, is both playful, and, somehow, ancient. In the end, since the music performs here in an admirably restrained way, there is mainly that voice, and the question, this time, is: is the voice going to put aside its performances, its Billie Holidayisms, which are a way to push back against the vulnerability of musical performance, in order to let us in? Yes, the reason why the storm comes to shore, and dashes to bits every hectare of resistance, is because she lets us in (I will try to sing it pure and easily), because she has a job with this composition, and the job is remedial repair of human apartness, and so she while she cannot go further than she goes, because there are limitations with this voice (she has make do with the vibrato, and with the little crevices and cracks in her instrument, because she will never be a gospel singer), and so it becomes a system of avowels, a system of proofs, of reparations, because of the singing, and that’s why the thing slays the listener, wracks his coast, and so let us now go back to the beginning again, and talk about the words.

You’re like a saint’s song to me, I’ll try to sing it pure and easily. You’re like a Mexican blue, so bright and clear and pale in the afternoon. Which means what? What is a saint’s song, and is it necessarily something both pure and easy? Let’s say that a saint’s song is one that has suffering as one of its features, one of its uppermost features; let’s say that a saint’s song, the one that Holland must sing now, the one involving reparations, has suffering as one of its features, and that in a saint’s song, the saint welcomes suffering, and welcomes the overcoming of suffering, and that is involved with reparations. And what then of that blue? The Mexican blue? I’m thinking of that pale blue of Mexican tiles, and what is so spectacular about that particular blue is that is has no aqua. The anodyne, self-loving, narcissistic American blue always has that aqua in it, but the Mexicans with their more restrained blue, know what suffering is, and know what loss is, and so before Holland is even to get into the specifics of the addressee in this love letter, we have the suffering of saints, and the heartache of our neighbor to the south, without any of that Club Med Caribbean blue, which is always about Margaritas and SPF15.

After which the addressee comes riding into the lyric on her bicycle. It’s no longer afternoon, now, night has fallen, and night when all the best love songs come to fruition, and here is the lover at night, and there are hydrangeas blooming, in moonlight, let’s imagine, which means that it is summer, and they are probably blue hydrangeas, not pink or white, because we are concerned here with the modalities of blue, and that means that there is a certain Ph balance to the alley in which Holland sees the addressee, because Ph determines the color of the hydrangea blossoms. What we further know is that the song “Mexican Blue” is dedicated to Samantha Parton, one of the members of the Be Good Tanyas, if in fact the Be Good Tanyas still exist, and that if the song is about friendship and love lost, love that the lyricist is attempting to repair, then it is natural that we might read into this dedication, and imagine that the song is about Sam Parton, though there is no real reason to go down this road, except for the sheer invention of interpretation, and because it is good to people a lyric with imagoes, phantastes, as the song itself does itself (There’s a mockingbird behind my house who is a magician of the highest degree), and who knows if they were lovers, and if Sam Parton is the lover invoked in this song, it doesn’t matter in the end, but it matters just that there is a lover, and that the lover, at least in the second half of the song is a woman, because what makes this song better than all the other love songs, is how comprehensive its apology, and how particular is its addressee; it’s not a general love song, a long song that means to describe all love, or to stand in for a love for the divine, as in the Gospel song, it’s about a particular person, and it lodges a particular apology, and so Sam Parton stands in for that person, until we know otherwise, and this addressee is wearing a corduroy jacket and riding a bike, and it’s probably one of those shitty three-speed bikes that no one will ever steal, and there’s a galloping dog beside the addressee, a mutt with a bandana, and that is enough to begin what is to come, this ballad of love and loss and a wish for reconciliation in the shape of a circle, an annular system (to use the David Foster Wallace formulation), and from the dog we go straight to a rhetorical approach that characterizes the middle of the song, which is to say the throwaway lines flanked by the heart-wrenching lines, and so we have When I was hungry you fed me/I don’t mean to suggest that I’m like Jesus Christ/Your light overwhelmed me/When I lay beside you sleepless in the night. If the second line of this quatrain were not here, the verse would not stick, even though I don’t mean to suggest that I’m like Jesus Christ is a classic Holland trope, the don’t-take-it-all-too-seriously-thing, though in fact all is serious here, all is as serious as it could possibly be, which is to say as serious as high art, as serious, to me, as Shelley, or Keats, and thus, the quatrain that follows, to which I alluded, the moment in which the piano ballad gives way to the band: And when you dreamed my guardian spirits appeared/And the moon stretched out across your little bed/They said they’d started to get worried about me/They were happy we had finally met/We had finally met. Which in turn suggests that Holland believes that she was a figment in the addressee’s dream, or that love itself is a figment of the dreamer’s dream, made even more poignant by the fact of Holland’s insomnia, and the smallness of the bed, and the smallness of the bed insures, for this exegete, the idea that the addressee is a woman throughout the song, because it is only women who will content themselves with the small bed, with the foam twin lofted high up on telephone books, with every possible possession mounded around the bed, and three more pillows than are humanly necessary, this is where love and sleeplessness take place and this is where the drums and the electric guitar come in.

The middle section of the song, which I will now quote in its entirety because to do less would be disservice (A mysterious bird flies away/Seemed to be calling your name/And bounced off the top of a towering pine/And vanished in the drizzling rain/
There’s a mockingbird behind my house/Who is a magician of the highest degree
And I swear I heard him rip the world apart/And sew it back again with his fiery melody, melody), is the most symbolically potent portion of the composition, is perhaps the content of the dream of the semi-sleep of Holland, the insomniac lover, as she dozes in the little bed, or is perhaps her idea of the dreams of her lover, and the birds here are classical birds, birds as auguries, the future foretold in the flight of birds, and initially this bird is mysterious, and because I have already used mysterious to describe Holland herself, perhaps this bird is Holland, as indeed all figments in dreams are the self, lets say that this is Holland, Holland falling out of the bed of her lover, Holland falling out of the Be Good Tanyas, falling away from her friendship with Parton, who is then herself the mockingbird of the second half, the magician of the highest degree, and what does it mean to be so accomplished in the black arts; well, one thing we confidently assert in the context of song is that the highest of all arts, in the dream of “Mexican Blue,” is that music itself is the highest of arts, and so the mockingbird, with its thousand voices, is a musician of the highest degree, who can rip the world apart, as Jesus Christ (to use the thrown away invocation of the first verse), is said to have done at the moment of his ascension, sewing it back together with his fiery melody, I can’t put into words how beautiful I think this section of the song is, especially the performance, the vocal, it’s just as beautiful as anything I have ever heard, and it is right before Holland gets into the meat of her apology, but before she does so, she offers this dream, and says, in effect, that the dream of music is the one thing that can sew up our disaffiliations, this song, and when she says and what she’s saying is that the best songs are the night songs, the love songs of the night, and whereas she runs out of breath at the end of the prior verse, when she sings we had finally met, it’s out of sadness, perhaps, but on this verse she seems to understand how she is saying the thing that needs to be said in the richest way, the most artful way, so that when she says I swear I heard him rip the world apart and sew it back again with his fiery melody, and the drummer does one of his very few rolls, it is because this is the first true way to say what has to be said, which is also what comes next, in it’s most direct form: When you were mad at me I didn’t care/And I just loved you all the same/And I waited for the wind to push the hurricane/Out to sea, and the sun could shine again.

What was the crime committed? Oh come on, you have done so many horrible things, and I have done so many horrible things. Sometimes it’s amazing to me that I can get up and walk to the door, face the day, there is so much to be remorseful for, and I would argue, in the context of “Mexican Blue,” that one can only continue to perform in a daily way because one is so good at forgetting, because humankind is the forgetting animal, because otherwise it would all be impossible, just even going to buy a bag of pretzels at the corner market would be impossible, because of all the horrors committed in this life, just the horrors of recent weeks are enough to put one to bed for months, and yet there is something we can do for one another, we can forgive one another, and we can lodge our apologies in the hope of this forgiveness, and when Holland says I waited for the wind to push the hurricane out to sea, she is doing just this, she is apologizing and living in the hope of forgiveness, and what more loving thing can one broken and underperforming individual do for another but offer this gift of forgiveness? In the subsequent lines she twice repeats the line Everything is so much better when you’re around, and it could be a specific person of course, the specific addressee, but it could also be a reiteration of the importance of community, and in this verse Holland departs from the melody and moves up some in her range, a third or a fourth, in order to sing the lines Just don’t float so high you drift away/Stand tall, with your feet on the ground/I love your songs, I love your sound/Everything is so much  better when you’re around. And this is usually the spot in hearing “Mexican Blue” when I am helpless before it, and it’s because I can’t believe how generous the song is, and how loving, and how clearly it is attempting to say things in the context of the song that Holland could not say to the addressee before, in plain, unvarnished words, and you can imagine that perhaps it took weeks to sing these lines, and to sing them with the right emphasis, which is to say the selflessness required, in order to say This is my gift, I’m giving you this song, at which point the song goes back into the symbolic realm of opals and amethysts, and back into the bed: I’ll remember all your dreams and the mysteries/You have borne in your crystalline soul/That you sing from your golden throat/That you shine from your sparkling eyes/That you feel from the goddess in your thighs.

Was it just an argument, or a series of disagreements between people who cared about one another? Or was it something else that failed between them? Were they lovers once, who found themselves in some intimate engagement that they weren’t ready for? What we know for certain is that the lovers of the past carry away a hunk of us, some gristle or sinew, when they depart in their misery and disconsolation, and if we can repair the loss we are restored, somehow, to a somewhat more perfect wholeness otherwise unrecaptured, and so there’s a reason to do it, to go through the extremely demanding reunion, the slightly shameful and humbling reunion, with all the pain attendant thereupon, and “Mexican Blue” does this, it carries us back to the lost person and brings about the uncomfortable repair, and when it returns to its beginning, when it repeats the first verse at the end, it is, as I’ve said circular, feminine, annular, and in the process it asserts the necessity of returning to this place of apology, because the job is never done, and the addressee is always in danger of running off again, or there is some other addressee, and we are ever readying ourselves to speak anew the truth of love and loss, even if we don’t want to, and recoil from it, and this is why “Mexican Blue” is the best song of the millennium, because it speaks this unpalatable truth, and in this unpalatable truth the individual is not larger than life, the performer is just another fuckup, the individual is more modest than we would prefer for our heroes to be, and so the truth is unpalatable and involves deflation, so it seems to this exegete, and I admire this kind of truth a great deal, and I admire the kind of artist who collects these notions (and it looks like she did it again, by the way, on “Mexico City,” from The Living and the Dead), and all the cultural flotsam in the world is opposed to this kind of thing, and that’s part of why this kind of thing is so important.

Here’s a more direct way of saying it: I wish someone cared enough about me to write a song like this about me. A song with this much thoughtfulness and generosity. It really is the rarest of things.

Related Posts:

• ROCK OUT WITH YOUR BOOK OUT #1: JOLIE HOLLAND
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• The Rumpus Interview with Jolie Holland