Jon Nolan has spent the past 10 years being married, having
kids, living in the postcard environs of northern New England, and spinning
metaphorical wheels to the point of tire detonation in an oft-waylaid attempt
at piecing together That Difficult Second Album while navigating all of those
other pleasant things.
The odds were therefore steeply stacked against what art was
eventually going to result. Steeply to
the point of listing precariously in gentle breezes or closer-than-average moon
orbits. All of those country roads and
colonial-era homesteads. All of the
family dinners and marital bliss. It
isn’t the prototypical tinder for a blaze of country-rock shitkickin’
brilliance. For heavens’ sake, the
lead-in line for one of the new album’s hugest choruses is, “I am so deeply in
love with you.” Circumstances obviously predicted
the arrival of some type of forsaken vapid demi-folk warm-glow monstrosity.
Prior to the domestic wilderness years mentioned above,
Nolan fronted 1990s shoulda-been-a-sensation and shoulda-been-called-something-way-better
alt-country outfit Say Zuzu. Subsequently,
on the other side of non-sensational Zuzu success realities, he successfully lit
the thrusters for solo debut When the
Summers Lasted Long in 2005.
Nolan is no average singer-songwriter; there is no yeoman’s
era of dodgy Zuzu work, and no half-assedness to that first solo foray. To wit, here is an incomplete list of Say
Zuzu songs worth tracking down for your digital library. They rank among any best-of from the
1990s-2000s era of American alt-country brilliance: “Broken,” “Snows,” “The Farm,” “Buxton,” “Take
These Turns,” “Wastin’ Time,” and basically the entire freaking final album Every Mile.
(Seriously, buy these songs somewhere. And moreover, save pennies for the band’s
version of traditional arrangement “Moonshiner,” which is basically eight times
as good as the Uncle Tupelo version.
Which should also count for something.)
Most importantly, Jon Nolan is now back, and in addition to
husbanding and parenting, he has spent significant portions of the last several
years working as a producer and evidently absorbing the Tau of the Recording
Studio. Everything Has Changed sounds beautiful and is awash in instruments. This is no Happy Sap With His Guitar, no
Two-dollar PBR Open Mic Night merch stand offering.
“Record Shop Girl”
careens onto the stage with a wonderful combination of shambolic playing and
pristinely-spaced instruments. The
alchemy of looseness and expertise is an immediate winner. Headphones grin. Boozy harmony vocals kick in. Lyrics reference a bewitching combination of
chunky glasses, blue hair and tattoo(s.)
Again, not exactly a by-the-numbers salted New England folk-outfit ode
to growing old gracefully. And thank
goodness for that.
By a few seconds into the album’s third track “Things Were
Better,” some charming new tendencies have grown clear, chief among them the
soul in Nolan’s voice, and his new shine for harmony vocals. Sometimes the voices are multitracked Nolans,
and sometimes they are guest pipes, but they show up a lot, and to splendid
effect. Baroqued-up harmonies connote
the heft of both care and intent, and they are almost invariably tons of fun to
boot. Here they appear on each of Everything Has Changed’s first three
songs, and by the time we arrive at the 70’s blush of “Things Were Better,”
they also—apologies for playing spoiler—go falsetto. The effect is effectively perfect.
The other persistent early-going realization is how well
this album was recorded/produced/mastered.
It regularly fills both ears with instruments both ubiquitous and
economically wielded. There are no extra
notes; there is no indulgent noodling.
But the sound stage of Everything
Has Changed is expansive, and the rollicking introduction of songs 1-3
distills a listener’s awareness of all of this.
It is an occasion to bust out a high bitrate and a nice pair of headphones:
an invitation to find a comfortable
chair.
And so we arrive at what might fairly be termed a watershed
moment in the history of Jon Nolan published material. “Fresh Cut Grass” is Big, a ballad’s ballad,
and as such is the latest big swing at a form that has not always fit snugly within
the Nolan/Zuzu wheelhouse. The history
of Say Zuzu is strewn with a goodly number of ballads that either went Clunk,
or were outsourced to the rhythm guitarist.
Here, it turns out instead, we all reap the benefits, and
vulnerabilities, of age, and aging.
The underlying melody is both gauzy and pretty, there is
soft reverb everywhere, and the concrete nouns (“the cord stretched out the
window / the radio on the fence;” “wood to be stacked”; cicadas) are everywhere,
too. It doesn’t take much of the song’s
five minutes, actually, to realize that these nouns are the stuff of the past,
and as such are dearly beloved. “Someone
wanna tell me where the days have gone?”
They may fade, but they ain’t
forgotten yet,
And I have no regrets at all.
The sum effect of the itemized images and the poignant
melody is of the inevitability of loss. Anyone
who has grown up rural, or semi-rural, or small-town is going to hear all of
this and wince. And anyone who has grown
up like that and ended up elsewhere far-removed is going to hear it and weep.
After the concise follow-up succor of “Feels Right,” the
listener arrives at the statement piece of the sixth and title track. Yes, it is about being married and being in
love, and hot on the heels of recent-track existential dread and loss, there
exists no doubt the potential for whiffing awkwardly at a change-up. But here again the overarching skill with
structuring and recording a song shines through. Nolan weaves into and out of falsetto again
for the chorus, and deftly brings in what might fairly be termed A Lot of Brass
on the heels of the first chorus. By the
second rev through the chorus, the brass is gloriously everywhere, and By God,
this sounds amazing.
There is no latter-half letdown to follow. “You Ran Right Over Me” compares favorably to
peak-era Wilco, “Wishing Well” manages to have a great deal of fun by waxing a
tad sardonic about a potentially cloying metaphor, and album closer “Four
Walls” bears a winning resemblance to peak-era Zuzu.
Nolan has never been the world’s most opaque or intriguing
lyricist, and that tendency remains intact.
But the chief associated hazard of his lyrical approach—the risk of an
unsmoothed phrase or image getting stuck in a craw somewhere—never comes to
pass. Instead arrive the aforementioned
concrete nouns and their vivid attendant imagery, and a cartload of sonic
touches that are stunning for how much they add to the final product.
If the potential downside to the circumstances surrounding Everything Has Changed was some horrific
version of folk-inflected creative entropy, such a downside was thankfully
never within a country mile of the finished product. It is
instead all triumph: the happy-tears
sepia recall of years gone by, and the smoldering burn of The Great Middle
Years.
It is a great thing to grow simultaneously older and
happier. It is a nifty thing to meld the
impression of ease with the painstaking of great skill. And it is a rare thing to then get it all
down on tape the right way. This is
masterpiece-level stuff.
Keepers 1-10
October 2013
