|
| Photo
credit: Autumn De Wilde |
|
On
her third Nonesuch release, Saltbreakers, singer-songwriter
Laura Veirs remains tantalized by the mysteries and marvels
of the natural world, filling her work with images, both
precise and poetic, of the ocean and the stars. But she
digs even deeper this time into the vagaries of human
nature, transforming the turbulence of her own life, as
well as her concerns about the hair-trigger state of the
world at large, into a collection of songs distinguished
as much by their emotional urgency as by their often astonishing
musical inventiveness.
"Lyrically I drew more from my personal life
on this record than with anything I've done in the past,"
says Veirs. She aims to convey the feeling, if not the
specific circumstances, of an intense period in her personal
life: the end of a long-term relationship, and the unexpected
start of a new one, coupled with a move from Seattle to
Portland. She recalls this recent time as "a real
emotional pendulum. I was swinging from joy to despair
and back again. I was bouncing off the walls." She
channeled her restless energy into writing material that
mirrors those dramatically swinging moods; it shifts from
brooding to euphoric to the hauntingly contemplative.
"I needed to say something truthful," admits
Veirs. "I wasn't afraid to look at my dark side."
And she doesn't waste any time doing that, opening Saltbreakers
with the lines, "Sorry I was cruel/I was protecting
myself/Drifting along with my swords out flying/Tattering
my own sails/then I tattered yours too."
"It was nice to be direct," she admits. "But
I still like to leave the songs open enough so that listeners
can create their own images, their own ideas. On my early
records, I was much more direct. It was all narrative.
Then I went into a lot more obscure and poetic place.
Now I've created a nice balance between those things."
Veirs recorded the album in Seattle, with band-mate Tucker
Martine (The Decemberists, Bill Frisell) once again producing
and mixing. Though she now calls her group Saltbreakers,
it's actually comprised of her longtime compatriots, formerly
known as the Tortured Souls -- guitarist/bassist Karl
Blau, keyboardist Steve Moore and drummer Martine. The
name change was a practical decision: "I didn't want
to talk about that Tortured Souls thing anymore. It just
got old," Veirs, who also plays guitar, explains
with a laugh, remembering lots of bad jokes about the
moniker.
Over the last three years, the band has traveled the world
in support of Veirs' previous Nonesuch albums, Carbon
Glacier (2004) and Year of Meteors (2005),
assiduously cultivating an international fan base. Veirs
continues to praise the musicians' strong interrelationship:
"The band has gotten really close. We've become like
a real family. It's felt like that for a long time, but
it's even more so now. Before we made this record, I demo-ed
the tracks at home using Garageband. Then we went on a
short west coast tour and played the new material. One
of the big pay-offs of the way we work was then being
able to go into the studio and just play the songs."
The title track of Saltbreakers also marks the
debut of her fellow players as backing vocalists; they
gamely follow Veirs' lead, negotiating her twisting trains
of thought and idiosyncratic cadences while managing to
make it all sound relaxed and conversational. The lyrics
to "Saltbreakers," inspired by A.S. Byatt's
novel Possession, evokes the romantic intensity
of the source material, but Veirs' group gives the song
a disarmingly buoyant, R&B-like feel. As Veirs recalls,
"Karl has sung with me before, but this was the first
time for the entire group. They did it all live, clapping
in a room together. There was a lot of laughing. I had
to make up the last verse on the spot because we realized
that we needed something more, the song wasn't ready to
end. I like seeing the process unfolding in the studio
like that. That's the fun of recording as a group."
Salt became a unifying theme for the album – the
salt in tears, the salt in ocean waves, the salt left
behind by perspiration after, as Veirs puts it, "a
long sweaty night of the soul," the point at which
opening track "Pink Light" begins. "The
idea felt visceral," says Veirs, "so I ran with
it." The sea and waves – or saltbreakers, as
Veirs likes to call them – are a leitmotif: "I
have a lot of dreams about whales, and the sea itself
is so mysterious, ineffable, infinite. You can never know
completely what's going on under the surface. That really
intrigues me. The sea is both nurturing and destructive:
it can be safe and luscious and comforting or a real tyrant.
Waves, of course, can wash things away, absolve you, clear
the beach of detritus, or they can bring a bunch of stuff
back in."
On "Ocean Night Song," in which guest star Eyvind
Kang's viola is transformed into a ghostly undersea wail,
Veirs envisions her soul floating into the deep to join
the whales already swimming there. These "herds of
the sea" – a phrase that echoes Herman Melville's
Moby Dick, a touchstone for Veirs -- pass by
again on the gentle, jangly "Cast a Hook in Me"
as the narrator of the song is willingly seduced by a
merman. Veirs has lately been drawn to the work of Nobel
Prize-winning Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, whose
apocalyptic novel Blindness helped to shape "Don't
Lose Yourself." She actively sought Saramago's permission
to adapt his images of a society upturned by an epidemic
of hysterical blindness. "Don't Lose Yourself"
transforms social commentary, and a little bit of personal
confession, into a sort of magical realism, while "Phantom
Mountain" features a startling, fuzzed-out guitars
and rock and roll drum-kit sound. Says Veirs, "We
like to push different boundaries. We play loud and get
noisy. I like some edge, along with some beauty, in my
work."
Perhaps the most beautiful moment on Saltbreakers,
the one sure to entrance both dedicated fans and the uninitiated,
is "To the Country," a call-and-response collaboration
between Veirs and the eight-voice Cedar Hill Choir, whose
almost otherworldly white gospel singing was triple-tracked
by Martine. He recorded them in the studio at Johnny and
June Carter Cash's cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee,
where, Veirs recounts, "You could feel the energy
in that room. There are pictures of family -- mothers,
fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers -- and a mantle that
all the famous people who have recorded or visited there,
like Bob Dylan, have signed. We were really excited to
be asked to sign it too." Fellow Nonesuch artist
Bill Frisell plays guitar on the track, which, despite
the studio setting, owes more to the spare, hypnotic music
of Mali, which Veirs has been exploring, than to American
country music.
Choirs seem to suit Veirs' material. A 45-member chorus
of middle school students from Cognac, France, calling
itself The Young Rapture Choir, created their own arrangements
of Veirs' repertoire. Martine recorded them in concert
last year and Veirs has released a limited-edition disc
on her own Raven Marching Band imprint. More recently,
a teacher from Spain sent Veirs 30 individual notes from
his students, each of them thanking her for making the
fantastical, gravity-defying video for "Galaxies,"
from Year of Meteors. Perhaps they're responding
to an element of child-like wonder in her work. A fairy
tale-like quality is certain there, but older, more knowing
ears will find something even more engrossing in these
songs: the sound of a real life unfolding between the
crashing sea and the twinkling stars.
-- Michael Hill |
|
|
|
|
