Anomalous Events (5)

It’s been a few months since I listened to Anomalous Events. La Luna, by Daniel Romano’s Outfit, came out in September, sending me on a massive Daniel & Family kick (Carson McHone’s Still Life, Julianna Riolino’s All Blue, Steven Lambke). Some deeper digging into Richard Thompson’s 1980s made it in there too, because the modal guitar solos on Carson McHone’s Folk Song are just too good. (Who plays those anyway, Daniel or Carson?) Then Ragnar Zolberg put out what may be his best record yet, about a month ago, and took priority.

Ah but then, on October 7th, Al Joshua released the first single from his own upcoming full-length. I went into my first listen of the new song (the first of twenty or thirty listens that day) expecting something sublime, and that’s what I got, but Al surprised me yet again by just how many different roads to glory he knows.

So alongside I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down and the just-released soundtrack offering A Clean Getaway, which is a beautifully sung and arranged fragment of a song from the Out of the Blue era, I’ve been spending time again with what I’m glad to call Al’s "back catalogue," as it may be dubbed now that a new album is forthcoming. There is nothing inside that back catalogue but wonder and majesty. I knew that, of course. Al is one of my two favorite living songwriters, and if you include those who’ve gone, he’s still in the top three. But the great thing about listening in cycles, as I do, is that each time you come back to a beloved artist, you find more there. The albums are richer for what you’ve experienced since you last had them on heavy rotation. Plus, you notice things you never noticed before. Take, for instance, these three thoughts, spurred by this week’s listen to Anomalous Events:

1.  It figures, to some extent, considering how dense these song-stories are, but all the same, I’m half-ready to swear that Al Joshua had pulled a Kanye and gone back and edited these songs, and incorporated the edits into all existing streams, mp3 rips, downloads, etc. In several songs there were lines I felt I had never heard before. But I have heard this album—I’d estimate—upwards of forty times. So where in the world were these seemingly new details coming from? I am so enamored of Anomalous Events, so fascinated by its mysteries and secrets, that I feel I’ve studied it, not just listened to it. How is it that I never realized that, for instance, the narrator of The Boy with the Pigeon Chest finds the Boy by following the strains of a song? Why had it always puzzled me when, much later in the song, the narrator hisses, “Where did you learn that song?”—why would it puzzle me if the reference had been there all along?! It’s so strange. And, if nothing else, a testament to the album’s unparalleled richness. "Unparalleled" is not meant as hyperbole. It’s just that nothing like this has happened to me before.

2.  The recorded music I make as Grain Sparrow is rudimentary. Sometimes I do wistfully entertain thoughts of how it might be nice to record under conditions better suited to audio fidelity, or with proper harmony singers, or with a band. Granted, most of the time I feel amazed that there is enough of health, peace, and mental and imaginative acuity for me to be able to write and record music at all. Besides, as far as studio-like audio sheen and the benefit of having multiple musicians on your songs are concerned... what about Daniel Johnston?! And what about my beloved Devendra Banhart’s first album, Oh Me Oh My, recorded onto cheap equipment when not by phone, onto friends’ answering machines? Oh Me Oh My in particular is an album I am blown away by every time I go back to it. Truly, truly, what more does a songwriter need than what can be found just at hand? An acoustic guitar, an approximately operational singing voice, and some gadget with a "record" button. If the songs are good enough, everything else falls away.

For years, Oh Me Oh My was my go-to "comforting reminder / inspirational Exhibit A." But Anomalous Events gives me an argument even more compelling than Devendra’s debut, for here there is not even a guitar (or, yes okay, there is, but only briefly). Here there is nothing but a voice, and a gadget with a "record" button (a smartphone, in Al’s case). The songs are transcendent, so the voice and the phone are plenty. Nothing else is needed. You can make an all-time great record with just these: Al Joshua has. Therefore I, and any other artist of limited means, have no excuse, none!—not to plunge as deep as possible into the depths of self and soul, turning over the stones there, searching for songs.

3.  But I do wonder what some of these would sound like arranged for a band. Imagine the group that backs Al on I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down performing The Kings and Queens of England or A Bird Flew In!