I was going through an Uncut UK phase and read a review of Finally Free, about how it was this weirdly overambitious and unsuccessful foray into psychedelic folk from proven country crooner/retro rocker Daniel Romano, with echoes of Van Morrison the album might have been better off without. Of course I looked the album up immediately. I played it the same night and was blown away. Love on first listen.
That was 2019. Nothing else out under Daniel’s name at that point was even half as good as Finally Free, so all I could do was await a new release and wonder: god forbid Finally Free was a fluke? No previous releases suggested that a transcendent album was imminent. Maybe nothing that followed would hint of the past transcendence either. Such visitations happen.
2020 came. My wife and I were visiting family a few hundred miles north of Wuhan when the shit hit the fan. We hightailed it back to our tropical town in south China. We lived on an idyllic college campus. Everyone had gone away for winter break and stayed away, and sometimes it felt like the only creatures around were us and the birds. I read a lot of Agnon and Le Guin.
When I thought to check on Dan Romano again, Visions of the Higher Dream was out. So was Content to Point the Way. So was Super Pollen (though that turned out not to matter, the songs are charming but it’s old material, Modern Pressure era). So was Forever Love’s Fool, the 20-minute song featuring a member of Tool for chrissakes. The Infidels cover record had just come out. I love Infidels! I love Tool! Who was this man?!
This album, Visions of the Higher Dream, was the first of six Dan-penned full-lengths to see the light in 2020 (do not trust the You’ve Changed Records promo material, with its talk of ten full-length albums; they’re just feeding the lore, I think as a dig at the reviewers who cannot write the name “Daniel Romano” without prefixing it with “the prolific”). Hearing it, I was relieved and bemused. It wasn’t the direction I would have most liked him to go in (which was okay with me; artists never owe it to us to go the way we want them to, it’s up to us to follow, or to give up the chase) and parts of it sounded unremarkable, though clearly better than the rough efforts leading up to Finally Free.
But there were also recognizable flashes of the beauty and soul that had infused Finally Free. Lilac About Thy Crown is one of those songs that would probably appear in any Romano fan’s top five. Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape: try and resist that chorus. At Times the Fools Sing Freely has Scarlet Rivera-esque violin. Paper Rose sounds like a throwback to Daniel’s country era, but ends with the most soulful vocals on the album, two long wordless sighs that recall the beauty at the end of Celestial Manis.
So Finally Free had not been a fluke. The divine host had come and gone, perhaps, but some among its number had thought, “This is not a bad resting place,” and settled in.
When I tried listening to Visions of the Higher Dream earlier this week, I had to stop two thirds of the way through and go work on my own music. That’s one of the things that great music does — it makes me feel like anything is possible, and that a weak will and lack of effort are the only things keeping musicians from consistently releasing one or two masterpiece albums a year. (Bad music, on the other hand, makes me want to quit: what if I’m as awful at it, and as evidently unaware of the awfulness, as the person who made the bad music I’m currently hearing? Not worth all the effort, then, is it?)
It’s a fitting reaction, too, because the album seems to be about making music. The visions of the higher dream within the artist’s eyes or mind are transformed, in the artist’s hands, into songs.
Lilac About Thy Crown is about the relationship that a songwriter has with inspiration, as well as with the seed-idea, the newborn song itself, and finally the song when it is finished and ready to leave the writer behind. “The merry world around me,” Daniel sings as the song begins, “through windows I spy juniper / At times the beauty stuns me / and sets me toward the ground.” Having drawn in the life-breath of the world, the artist turns to the soil, to make something beautiful of his own. “When the season greets me,” goes a later verse, “I’ll ring out like a hammer / No place will be unknowing / No word will be untrue.”
When you ask an artist why they make art, the answer tends to boil down to, “Well, I can’t not make it.” Or as Daniel puts it: “The tide is slowly turning / And the universe aligning / To a new and simple finding / That I need not make a sound — / But [then] everything about me / Would start itself to spoiling.” It would be my favorite verse in the song if not for the one that comes in a quiet moment near the end: “My love is like a sunny brook / That shines out through the woodland / Impossible in beauty / Unlikely to be found,” then the band comes back in, and: “Yet she must go away me / Her fortune it is calling” — and the chorus, which had always gone “And ye are but a baby, lilac about thy crown,” this last time becomes, “And she no more a baby, lilac about the ground.” The new song is finished, and ready to depart; the songwriter does not get to know what will happen to her next. Instead, the song will come find us, the listeners, and live and grow with us, not with the one who made her. But at that moment, as she reaches her fullness, no longer an infant who relies on her maker, it is the maker who sees her beauty most clearly, and who acknowledges, calmly, sweetly (Daniel still being essentially a cult figure) that she, in all her raiments of beauty, is “unlikely to be found.”
Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape is more overt:
and everything else slips away.
When I return I’ve a melody’s yearn,
born of where, no one can say, but
isn’t it some kind of splendour,
something celestial and wild?
I feel the heat of the heavens on me,
The vocal delivery is vulnerable and strung-out, like Lennon singing Strawberry Fields Forever or Lucy in the Sky. The chorus has this incredible uplift to it, first hinging on repetitions of the title line (“sometimes I feel like a...”), the band building up, the drums fueling the rise, then an explosive second part to the chorus (“I can’t untangle the wonder! How could you ever relate?”), and finally, buoyed by Moondance horns, the kind of dance folk interlude that Richard Thompson might have thrown into one of his tales of squalor on a Richard & Linda album.
Paper Rose is a plea for love, from someone fed up with heartache. “Give me synthetic ribbons and bows,” goes the extended metaphor, “no more a darling that comes and then goes / Never to wither, never to close / Love like a paper rose.” The vulnerability is fearless and deep. There are lines in the opening verse that could be a manifesto for the whole album: “Let it be passionate, tender and warm / Almost a matter of fact.” I get chills just reading the lyrics off the page:
Make me a comparable cast.
Make it of something that lasts.
Bring me my fraudulent flame!
Let it be just like the real thing
but make so its mind doesn’t change.
Give me synthetic...
This is Daniel Romano: open and real with you, the listener, like a brother (who spends half his time alone, reading poetry and mysticism).
At Times the Fools Sing Freely seems to be a parable about performance, about the contrast between the artists, who pour out their hearts night after night, and a public that doesn’t look past the entertainment factor: “ ‘At times the fools sing freely / Let them sing,’ pray the people / ‘They are wretched sometimes, yes / But rarer times are quite profound / They do not bring us danger...’ ”
In the same song is a great segment about how inspiration works — “They ride the works of others / Collecting little tatters / And swallow it for keeping / Where nobody can go,” as well as this vivid image: “The brothers dance and twirl / Like dogs caught in a wheel” (I always heard “carved” instead of “caught,” which would also be a great line).
The title track could be about love or it could be about art: “I just can’t hide it anymore / There’s things I need to say / These visions that I’ve got / They just won’t go away.” The words sound like the manifesto of someone whose artistic spirit was liberated during the making of Finally Free. I love the bridge: “Maybe I’m lost in a reverie / Maybe a trick of the light / [But] maybe I see what I hold in my heart / And others aren’t seeing it right.”
Even when I can’t parse the lyrics so confidently, Daniel’s ability to hone in on an evocative phrase or image helps anchor the songs. “Contented and still, with my senses expressed — / Where can I take my rest?” “And me, I cannot be more lonely, I cannot be more lonely.” “The days are gathering in pyramids.”
The sound is like a punkier, funkier, and more lo-fi Rolling Thunder Revue — the aesthetic of 1976 with the precision and melodic focus of 1975, let's say. If you like the ’75 live version of Tonight You’ll Be Staying Here with Me, Visions of the Higher Dream should win you over fast.
If the album as a whole sounds samey to start with, give it time. Daniel is a master of — well, catchy vocal melodies, first and foremost, the kind that grab your attention early and make you want to relisten to a song just to indulge in its chorus — but also of little details. There are great flourishes and melody lines that weave in and out of the arrangements (the organ runs in the chorus of Nothing is Still in a Shaken Heart, the electric-guitar-&-drum-punctuated exclamations of “feudal lord” in the opener, the way the feedback at its end segues into the shimmering, billowing starlight of the horn-led intro to I Cannot Be More Lonely), and surprising turns, like the psychedelia in the middle of the funky ala The-Band-in-’75 Nobody Sees a Lowered Face, or the quiet bit in Lilac About Thy Crown.
It took me more than a year of steady listening to realize that every song on here is excellent (though the greatest songs do tower over the others). But I got there. Come back to thank me (or better, Daniel) when you do too.
(Back to: A Personal Canon)
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