AEM022 Trevor Wilson

There is a con­tra­dic­tion that hounds all music that resides some­where near the cross­roads of art and pop, said con­tra­dic­tion being more or less that art music is sup­posed to pro­voke and chal­lenge the lis­tener, while pop music is sup­posed to be catchy and digestible. Art music pokes you in the arm (kind of hard) and sits down to ask you trou­bling ques­tions about man’s place in the uni­verse; pop music lies down at your feet and looks cute (if you think I’m being dis­mis­sive of pop music, ask your­self which of those things would be more wel­come in your life at this very moment). A hybrid of these two styles is almost by def­i­n­i­tion impos­si­ble. A catchy melody gets stuck in your head and repeats itself end­lessly, often on a first or sec­ond hear­ing. You find your­self hum­ming it while mak­ing toast. This is the exact oppo­site of the aware­ness and atten­tion and work that art music is sup­posed to require. You do not often find your­self mum­bling excerpts from the Rite of Spring while pour­ing milk over your generic-brand Cheerios.

Since good art music is by def­i­n­i­tion chal­leng­ing, it requires of its cre­ators a rest­less­ness that would, gen­er­ally speak­ing, devour a pop song whole, leav­ing only frag­ments behind. Think for exam­ple of the Akron/Family song “Part of Corey”, which takes a del­i­cate acoustic song and buries much of it in bru­tal sta­tic. When some­one with this nat­ural adven­tur­ous spirit decides to ded­i­cate their life to pop music, we reap the always intrigu­ing and some­times baf­fling ben­e­fits. Why no, I haven’t for­got­ten about Trevor Wil­son. This is just where Trevor Wil­son comes in. First, an intro­duc­tion: Wil­son is a New Eng­land born pianist and song­writer pos­sessed of an unusual flut­ter­ing voice, bird­like but sub­stan­tial, which he con­trols with pleas­ing pre­ci­sion, end­ing most phrases with a burst of tightly packed vibrato. Vibrato has fallen out of style these days what with all the I’m-just-a-fragile-yet-soulful-guy-in-my-bedroom things going on, but man, some­times it just sounds great. Wil­son is rel­e­vant here not only because this arti­cle is about him but also because he has a predilec­tion for very com­plex and con­cep­tual pop music and because in the last few years he has pro­duced a num­ber of fan­tas­tic and com­pletely dif­fer­ent works, fea­tur­ing incred­i­bly detailed orches­tra­tions, unortho­dox forms, and melodies that draw reck­lessly from some of the newest and old­est tra­di­tions of pop music. In his vocal swoops and quick­sand har­monies, you can even hear strains of jazz, back when jazz was pop.

2007’s Tall Ships, the name of a five-piece band that has since dis­banded, fea­tures the con­tra­pun­tal male-female vocals that are one of the sta­ples of Wilson’s songs. Lack­ing the con­cep­tual angle of the more recent stuff, Tall Ships fea­tures a num­ber of songs about things, but the most strik­ing ele­ments here are the gen­tle and sub­tle com­plex­i­ties of rhythm and form. Three of the first four songs are in five-four time, some­thing you prob­a­bly wouldn’t notice until you’d lis­tened through a few times, and the vocal melodies leap and curve all over the place. Try singing along. It’s hard. The songs also fea­ture some seri­ously non­tra­di­tional har­mony, which blows by you so fast under the busy melodies that again, it takes a long time to even notice. Instru­ments def­i­nitely sug­gest their own direc­tions, har­mon­i­cally speak­ing, and Wilson’s being a pianist has cer­tainly affected his song­writ­ing in a delight­ful and refresh­ing way.

Plants & Bod­ies, released last year, is a col­lec­tion of two themed song cycles. The first, full of plant metaphors that are some­times more appro­pri­ate than oth­ers, fea­tures huge arrange­ments, packed to over­flow­ing with accor­dion, strings, harp, per­cus­sion and scores of voices, while the sec­ond uses a more pared down piano and voice setup, bring­ing Wilson’s voice into the fore and pro­vid­ing a detox period after the madly bustling orches­tra­tions of the first half. The songs swing and bounce and coast and glide and never ever stop mov­ing, in a way that is both immensely sat­is­fy­ing and really dif­fi­cult. It takes a few spins through before you start to get your bear­ings, but like most music that requires some work, it’s incred­i­bly reward­ing. Hear­ing the drums quickly para­phrase the vocal line, or the sud­den entrance and dis­ap­pear­ance of a richly har­mo­nious string quar­tet is the kind of thing that makes art music so nour­ish­ing. The more you lis­ten, the more you begin to see all the care­fully posi­tioned ele­ments, like easter eggs coded into a video game for diehard fans. The first time I ever met Wil­son he spent thirty min­utes com­pul­sively align­ing the CDs I had given him with the cor­ner of the cof­fee table (while we were talk­ing, he’s not a weirdo), so I have no doubt that every note here is full of intention.

This year has seen the online-only release (via Wilson’s Band­camp site) of a trip­tych of con­cep­tual song cycles.  The first, enti­tled Growth & Decay and con­cerned with the very same stuff, is writ­ten for string quar­tet, vocal quar­tet and lead vocal­ist.  The sec­ond is an album of ukulele dri­ven com­po­si­tions, enti­tled Anawan.  And the third, from which “B-side “Des­ti­na­tion” is drawn, is from Hard Times, an album con­cerned with the post-college lull and eco­nomic down­turn.  Not to men­tion, of course, this here dig­i­tal sin­gle, which fea­tures two new tracks. The first, “El Regalo”, is a bit of an out­lier in Wilson’s cat­a­logue, by his own descrip­tion, while the sec­ond, “Des­ti­na­tion”, comes from the Hard Times ghost album, as Wil­son calls it.

“El Regalo”, sung oddly enough in Span­ish, fea­tures a dancy, reg­gae­ton inspired beat (cre­atively spiced up with some dis­guised vocal sounds) and at least two of those incred­i­bly catchy syl­labic melodies that Wil­son man­ages to insert into nearly every sin­gle song he writes. The mid­dle sec­tion devi­ates away from the more traditional-sounding verse melody and into some increas­ingly trippy Os Mutantes style latin-psych, with gui­tar and piano tak­ing increas­ingly fran­tic and atonal solos over a lazily descend­ing vocal line. B-side “Des­ti­na­tion” streams neatly rhyming post-college depres­sion lyrics (pride and guilt start pour­ing in/can’t move back into mom’s base­ment) over a bouncy, two-triad, oom-pah piano fig­ure that hon­estly sounds a bit like an Andrew Lloyd Weber song. The lyrics are alter­nately silly and dark, dis­play­ing a healthy skep­ti­cism of Wilson’s newly acquired degree, and set­tling finally on hum­ble accep­tance and a lime-juicing scheme. The will­ing­ness dis­played here to do things like sing in span­ish, take an 80 sec­ond gui­tar solo in a song that’s less than three min­utes long, and play with gen­res as untouched by most indie pop­pers as reg­gae­ton and show­tunes is exactly the kind of thing that makes Wil­son worth lis­ten­ing to and fol­low­ing, though this kind of open­ness inher­ently leads to some missteps.

Wil­son calls forth­com­ing album Anawan “an inves­ti­ga­tion of the effects of con­stantly search­ing,” a phrase that could eas­ily be taken and applied to his entire musi­cal career thus far. Even within the bound­aries of indi­vid­ual songs he is burst­ing with ideas, shift­ing forms, keys, melodies. You get the sense that the tri­umphant break­through is some­where ahead of him, maybe not too far, and that when he hits it, the first thing he will do is start look­ing for the next one.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — El Regalo Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Destination Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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