During my break from 10L, I didn’t stop listening to music. I didn’t stop caring. I just stopped writing about it. I laid in bed and ate fried chicken (more like friend chicken, youknowhatImean?) and read stories from the NBA Lockout. I tried to care more about college basketball. I drank some and didn’t drink a lot at the same time. Hell, I’m not sure that I did much of anything else. Milk and vegetables spoiled a lot more than I wanted them to because I overshot my mornings by a mile and spent the days lamenting.
If anything actually offered me solace, it was the occasional jam with Chris Bathgate’s Salt Year and trying to figure out if I really liked Richard Buckner’s Our Blood. My relationship with music isn’t always as complicated as it is with Buckner, as Bathgate’s catalog can attest. I am drawn to every Richard Buckner album with delirious haste. Listening and re-listening, I’m hooked by the opening riff. Then, I lose something each time I finish the record. Is Our Blood to be appreciated in small doses? Is the listener really to dismiss the catalog each time he/she hears a new song? The challenge of ignoring an artist’s past is really on trial here*. There’s nothing really different about this record as compared to the last few releases, but is that such a bad thing?
Independent of those questions is the importance of how good the songs are. Two examples: “Traitor” opens on a dark note to lead into the lighter, folkier “Escape.” Both could be placed firmly in the Buckner canon without digression from the mean, but they both stand alone as disciple-worthy. If this was your first time hearing RB, the stand outs are all there: the scattershot lyrics over repetitive instrumentation. Buckner’s brooding voice creating everyman stories while seeming vague enough to be his own variance. “Let’s waste the night/ pay the price and get out of here/ It’s not enough/ Backing out just to disappear.” All the ‘we’ and ‘they’ and ‘you’ and ‘them’ in the place of names are there. The listener could easily feel like he/she is any one of those pronouns, a part of the larger picture of Buckner’s specificity. That is his specific gift, involving the listener no matter how cold and separated the music may seem.
There are some reaches on the album: “Collusion” has a long-winded outro that collides with “Ponder’s” instrumental dreamscape. Buckner’s not exactly known for these kinds of long, vocal-less stints and it shows he can back away from his conversational lyricism quite nicely. I don’t love them on the album, but I like the songs theoretically. It’s a halftime from human folly that seems much-needed though not necessarily fantastic. The difference in the two albums I can’t get over: when Buckner does something different it is forced rather than focused. Perhaps being a veteran has its flaws. Bathgate has a seamless transitional quality. Neither singer has terrific range while both know how to use their voices to accentuate their music effortlessly. Buckner just seems more repetitive this time around– albeit with a flair and gusto still missing from most songwriters’ catalogs. I can forgive him for repetition; for knowing his niche and staying safe? I’m still, so far, undecided despite my own aformentioned foray into the unspectacular safe zone.
Of Bathgate: some fiddles, some loops, some questions, some piano, some acoustic, some electric, some lyrical playfulness, some answers, some serious, some graciousness, some long, some short, some songs, some album. Bathgate doesn’t really have any peers since no one is doing what he does. He’s a student of the folk game; wants to severely change it without destroying it. “No Silver” is a classic that could just as easily be sung at a stranger’s campfire jam session as it could on a stage to no one in particular. “Poor Eliza” is a song of predestinated sentience and, like most of his work, showcases how a storyteller can learn as a song progresses. The buildups in this song are a catalog of what is to come: each song is a perilous warning, a story and an overall test of will.
Throughout Salt Year, Bathgate vacillates between heavy details and a light moroseness. “Levee” and “Borders” are persona-to-object rockers: they are clever songs that bring us to conclusions without conclusions themselves. “Borders” in particular is an anti-work song, but you’d never know it if you just let the riff wash over you. I admit to doing that a few times. The title track offers a drifting quality– pedal steel floats you through 17 years of wasted youth and forlornness. Bathgate creates his songs from a mold unlike any other songwriter I’ve experienced. It was the same way I felt about Richard Buckner years ago.
That said, Bathgate took a chance with Salt Year. It is dissimilar from his catalog: more rock-n-roll than the predecessors, yet lonelier. The listener is not really invited to be a part of the story like Our Blood. We are left to figure out our place in the album. Instead of closing our eyes and being one with an all-too-well-known evening amongst the thresholds of important decisions– classic Buckner– we’re placed just outside the story and have to fight our way in. Buckner’s pathos vs. Bathgate’s ethos: this is the battle that brought me to both. There is nothing inherently wrong with either songwriter’s approach. They both created solid albums that I will revisit. Both have solid footholds in my want. Both have flaws. Neither can be blamed for those flaws because they are the greatest flaws in storytelling. Emotion is impossible to convey, yet these men did so with great effort and aplomb. Buckner’s flaws are heavier because he has always had them. Bathgate’s are new and unstable. Thus, Buckner’s flaws are forced but they are subtle. And neither has done the listener a great injustice here.
Me? I’ll be alright. There’s some cans of unspoiled black beans marking my efforts to grocery shop. I’ve got professional basketball back. I’ve got a philosophical argument to settle re: Buckner v. Bathgate. I may never publish the results. I’ve made my peace with Buckner’s repetition and Bathgate’s exclusions. I know, especially now, how inexplicably powerful the call to create is. And you create as best you can with the gifts you have, showcase them with the clarity they deserve and position yourself for the transition to either success or failure. It’s so rare to understand anything other than success or failure. Not to say I didn’t try to understand either in Salt Year or Our Blood, it’s just that some arguments should be settled, some should remain unresolved and others should have never surfaced. In this case, I’m better for having argued and for having given up arguing to enjoy the accompanying soundtracks.
*-A rule at 10L, not focusing on an artist’s past gives us a chance to write about an album instead what created it or our personal biases.
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