...And the Sky is Gray: 5 Songs for Fall
This week's songs are from Angel Olsen, Shadow, Nora Brown, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and Racing Mount Pleasant
RIP Donna Jean Godchaux
Best known as a singer with the Grateful Dead for most of the 1970s, joining (and leaving) within her husband Keith Godchaux, Donna Jean Godchaux had been a back-up session singer at the famed Muscle Shoals studios in the 1960s. She sang on Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” While I personally wasn’t a big fan of her contributions to the Dead, being a part of either one of those recordings alone qualifies someone for Rock & Roll immortality.
Fall weather arrived later this year, so the music can too.
I’ll be spending a good chunk of time with the recently released Nebraska reissue, timed to release of Deliver Me From Nowhere. Warren Zanes’ excellent book, on which the movie is based, connects Springsteen’s recording process for that seminal album to Paul Schrader’s “Man in a Room” film structure. A notable connection, especially given that at the time Schrader was trying to get Springsteen to act in a movie that was titled “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen lifted the title for a song he was working on around the same time. Nebraska, in part owing to its cover image, but mainly due to the starkness of the music and themes, sounds a lot like a Midwestern Fall to me. Sitting inside, playing quiet music in the dark.
Fall has the sound of acoustic instruments in its bones. “Guy and a Guitar” music. “Sad Dad” music. “Dad Rock.” Call it what you want. As a white male north of 40, that type of music is pretty firmly in my wheelhouse. To a degree, it’s one of those musical flavors I’m drawn to like a mosquito to a porch light. But as much comfort as we may take in it, it’s an impulse to be resisted, lest we end up in the not-too-distant-future telling a younger person that “Everything’s been crap since ‘Mr. November.’”
…Now that I think about it, quite a lot has.
“Sad Dad” music fits the season so well because the lingering sadness of aging is its milieu. There is a recognition of mortality, an awareness of time’s passage. So of course Fall is “Dad Rock” season. It seems almost inescapable.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.
Here are 5 songs for the Fall, non-Dad Rock edition.
“I thought that one day I’d have it all figured out: my life, my career. I’ll have an apartment or a house, maybe I’ll have a family or maybe I won’t, but I’m going to have answers eventually. I do have some answers, but I find more joy in not needing them. Curiosity can be a source of fulfillment. It can be a freedom.” - Angel Olsen
Angel Olsen - “Those Were The Days”
The opening chords of “Those Were the Days” come in with a chill like the door left open a touch too long on a windy day. Once it settles into the verse, Olsen longs for a past in a breezy whisper—cool to the point of being a bit frosty. It’s a departure for Angel Olsen, who normally sings with an edge to her voice, if not with a full force (see: “Never Be Mine”, also off MY WOMAN). There’s retro soul in the arrangement and softness in the recording befitting of the nostalgia in the lyrics. Where “Those Were the Days” turns into something special is about halfway through with the shift in the melody that cracks open the tension you didn’t even realize was established so carefully you hadn’t realized it was even there. Sometimes big emotions can be held close to the vest, and expressed deeply, but quietly. It’s an interesting and fascinating dynamic, executed perfectly.
“There is no modern analog for the world Earl was part of. That was a time when there was a concentration of fame, glamour and power that simply doesn’t exist anymore. Back then, there were still cultural gate-keepers and Earl was one of them – a whimsical one.” - Joe Hagan
Shadow - “I See My Days Go By”
Earl McGrath was one of those creatures of the 70s —there doesn’t seem to be a logical progression to his career, or even any direct experience. He was friends with Jack Nicholson and Joan Didion. He was a guy with “taste” good enough to get Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records to give him his own label. He ran Rolling Stones’ record label for a time, and was the first to sign Hall & Oates to a record contract. While working on his biography of Jann Wenner (Sticky Fingers), writer Joe Hagan got to know McGrath. When McGrath died in 2016, Hagan was offered the chance to purchase some of his belongings, so he bought his record collection for around $1,500 and found over 200 tapes from artists hoping to score a record contract from McGrath. Hagan waded through them and released Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath 1970-1980. A few artists and songs featured had some success (Jim Caroll, David Johansen) would go on to achieve some success (Hall & Oates), but many featured were (and still are) unknowns. The compilation is a fascinating time capsule. Soul and Americana and folk meld into something that is hard to pin down into any one genre, but you can see the shag carpet, papasan chair, and the tendrils of smoke coming off the incense burner.
Shadow’s “I See My Days Go By” has a bit of a Mamas & the Papas group singing on the outset, before singer Dave Gilbert takes over with a soulful verse in the middle section. Gilbert was the lead singer of Chicago’s own Amboy Dukes, Ted Nugent’s original band. A third section of the song reminds me of “Hooked on a Feeling,” with a chunky-funky beat that never made it out of the 1970s. It’s disjointed, but altogether a fun song.
“It’s about being a ‘story teller’, I guess, taking something you learned and singing it to someone else. They hear it and they know it’s not about you, but it’s about people, and you get to help those people’s stories live on by talking about them.” -Nora Brown
Nora Brown - “Little Satchel”
Fall is a time of transitions. First it’s slow, then all at once. The transition from day to night is a particularly sudden one. Nora Brown, the young banjo virtuoso, offers a perfect soundtrack for the mid afternoon that’s gone too soon. Take in those stray beams of light firing through the tree leaves into your windows. Wonder what the hell happened to the day for a few minutes. Try to achieve a little acceptance. Winter will have it’s moments. But don’t get ahead of yourself. Look at all the color in the trees while it’s there.
Brown’s Tiny Desk concert from 2021, recorded when she was a sophomore in high school, is worth your time, if only to see how it isn’t just her banjo playing that is beyond her years, but her love for folk traditions, and desire to take them seriously. Any of her albums are also worth your time. They all offer a gateway into Appalachian musical traditions, and establish their own sense of time and place. As with transitions, they make for a wonderful opportunity to wander and get a little lost.
“I loved ‘After The Gold Rush’ from the day I heard it. I remember all the things I thought it meant. The song was so visual…I thought it meant everything.” - Dolly Parton
“I would think, ‘This is the future.’ Neil’s seeing humans leaving the planet and go off to start a new space colony. I’ve always felt that Neil had a great deal of really uncanny prescience in his writing.” - Linda Ronstadt
“‘Hell, I don’t know [what it’s about]. I just wrote it. It just depends on what I was taking at the time.” - Neil Young
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris - “After the Gold Rush” (Live on Letterman)
Southern Indiana, where I went to college, has a lot to offer in the Fall. On one of those gray, cold days where you feel stuck inside with little to do but watch college football, a friend of mine suggested we go for a drive out towards Lake Lemon. Rolling hills, winding country roads along a lake, a beautiful spectrum in the trees, and some Neil Young playing on the car stereo. Turned out to be a perfect Fall day.
Young’s After the Gold Rush and Harvest have a sepia tint to them that lend themselves to Fall listens. His voice, particularly across these two records, is strikingly pure. Don’t believe me? Have a listen to pretty much any song from his Live at Massey Hall from 1971. He’s not hiding behind anything. He can hit the natural falsetto without getting too nasally, and is still tremendously expressive. After the Gold Rush was intended to be the soundtrack album for a movie Young’s neighbor Dean Stockwell wrote, but never ended up making. Along with “Cripple Creek Ferry,” the title track is the only song written for the project.
Parton and Ronstadt had already recorded versions for separate projects before recording it together for their collaborative 1999 album Trio II. Others to cover it include Thom Yorke, Patti Smith, k.d. lang, Natalie Merchant, and The Flaming Lips—all of them faithful. The first thing about “After the Gold Rush” is it’s a goddamned beautiful song. The second thing is, right there in the title is the implication that the good times are over. It’s an elegy. The structure follows an idyllic past, a sad present, and a redemptive future, with a best-possible-outcome version of The Rapture. Many of the above versions focus on the second thing. Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou—three of the greatest voices in music—ignore it. They focus on the first thing, as if to say the past is prologue, and I can ignore the present because I’m living here and now, only for this dream I’m having where we’re saved. The good times are over, but it’s in the darkest of hours that we are able to muster up all of the hope we can.
“I didn’t come away from ‘Racing Mount Pleasant’ learning anything new about the heart, or about longing or desire or working back through a past life to make sense of a present one, but I felt delighted by the experience nonetheless. Channeling patient emotional meditations through volume can shake some things loose.” - Hanif Abdurraqib
Racing Mount Pleasant - “Racing Mount Pleasant”
Racing Mount Pleasant sounds like the cool kids in their respective high school jazz bands got to college and started an emo band. They’ve turned into something special by Sophomore year. Now Chicago-based by way of Michigan, Racing Mount Pleasant have some juice going for them. I saw them open for Geese in October and they very quickly won an excited crowd over. (Always get there for the opener!) They claim Arcade Fire as a north star influence, but they lack the dark artist pretention, and I hear more of Bon Iver-era Bon Iver—strings, chunky drumming, horns, and an anthemic, cinematic sweep. In his not-entirely-positive review of Racing Mount Pleasant, Ian Cohen labeled these type of acts as “Grand Orchestral Collectives”
“Great Orchestral Collectives need to exist in contrast to a default character, stressing the sacrifice and passion required to sustain such an unwieldy format and deliver what your average power trio or singer-songwriter cannot.”
I would argue that Racing Mount Pleasant delivers on that promise. It’s unself-consciously earnest. A big sound for their leap into the adult version of Big Feelings. But something they do well—something Arcade Fire never really did—was create space in their arrangements. There are steps back to breath and reconsider the landscape. But if I’m trying to sell you on a “Grand Orchestral Collective,” I’ve got to deliver the goods and “Racing Mount Pleasant” is it. Propulsive pacing, dramatic pauses, group vocals. There’s a melancholic warmth to this sound that fits in with Autumn—a feeling of resolution and resignation that marks an ending on a canvas big enough that suits rolling hills (or tree-lined streets) full of yellow, red, and brown leaves. Then it lands on the question that, when asked, confirms that Fall is in full swing:
Can we stay inside?
Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs: