AEM070 Will Stratton

Will Strat­ton is poised at a moment of spir­i­tual and artis­tic growth, and lucky for us he is com­mit­ting it to tape (or hard drive, rather). His first two records, 2007’s What the Night Said and 2009’s No Won­der, were received warmly by fans of beau­ti­ful acoustic pop songs with spiderweb-delicate fin­ger­pick­ing and hushed, inti­mate vocals. For them he gar­nered innu­mer­able Nick Drake com­par­isons and hon­est, thought­ful praise from many cor­ners of the media. Coke Machine Glow called No Won­der “a lovely, hum­ble, mature record from a per­son who seems like a lovely, hum­ble, mature human being,” and this is exactly how it feels to lis­ten to it. Mature and hum­ble are hardly the attrib­utes that get the blog hor­mones flow­ing these days, but in some ways we are reap­ing the ben­e­fits of the fact that Strat­ton hasn’t com­pletely blown up in the hyper­bolic, slaver­ing world of blog music jour­nal­ism. No Won­der was a per­fectly lovely album that could have been repli­cated for an entire career (see Damien Jurado, for exam­ple). It is dra­matic enough to be mov­ing with­out com­ing any­where close to gaudi­ness, sim­ple and under­stated enough to seem com­pletely uncon­trived, intel­li­gent enough to ring true in a way that sur­passes plat­i­tudes, and warm enough that you get an imme­di­ate sense of the human heart behind the songs. The drama in it comes from del­i­cate inter­nal moments like walk­ing home, alone and lovestruck, after a party, the way it often does in real life, at least for the kind of peo­ple who tend to lis­ten to melan­cholic acoustic pop music that is heavy on the I-IV chord pro­gres­sions and lit­er­ate lyrics (I can be mildly snarky because I count myself squarely in this camp). Strat­ton could have had a lovely career work­ing within those straight-forward song forms, but he has the search­ing and self-critical per­son­al­ity of an artist, rather than just a craftsman.

Strat­ton was very young when he recorded those two albums (he still is, really), and had he been launched into the slob­bery jaws of even indie-stardom, we might not be see­ing the kind of growth we can see in his new music, some of which he has kindly allowed Ampeater to con­vey to you, the peo­ple. The appeal of the del­i­cate, melan­choly, direct songs of his first two albums is strong, and it hasn’t been ban­ished by any means, but here Strat­ton begins to mold it into some­thing less pre­dictable and more expan­sive. I’ll let him speak for him­self because he is incred­i­bly elo­quent: “There is a sin­gle spir­i­tual posi­tion that exists in songs like [Nick Drake’s] “Which Will” that is so strong that, when you hear it, it seems like it becomes the only thing that exists in the world(…)That kind of music, writ­ten from a place of such iso­la­tion, has the illu­sion of clar­ity. Maybe it has real clar­ity, it’s hard for me to say. Either way, I’m tired of being in that place. I want to forge out on my own and wind up some place I don’t rec­og­nize. I want to learn to express very spe­cific moments of anger, flir­ta­tious­ness, joy–all things that are more or less absent in Nick Drake’s music–with the same sort of gutwrench­ing pre­ci­sion that he used to express the false sense of omni­science that accom­pa­nies deep despair.”

After all that setup, you’re prob­a­bly expect­ing some death metal or fif­teen minute gui­tar solos or syn­thy 80’s pop. Well, there’s none of that, but impro­vi­sa­tion does play a key role these songs in a way that it never has before. A-side “Blue­bells” com­mences with an open piano-figure that recalls the begin­ning of Bon Iver’s “Babys”, but which is har­mon­i­cally sta­tic and prob­a­bly comes instead from inter­est in recent min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music (our con­ver­sa­tion was edu­ca­tional for me in this arena, to say the least, but I rec­om­mend check­ing out John Luther Adams, David Lang, Arvo Part, & Gavin Bryars for starters). Over this piano drone, Strat­ton lays out a few min­utes of warm, tum­bling gui­tar, all of which was impro­vised. He has lately taken to using first takes, say­ing that “it keeps me think­ing on my toes.” This inter­est in spon­tane­ity is another bold move, directly in oppo­si­tion to the pre­cise and mea­sured craft of his pre­vi­ous work, yet one which serves the song to the very same extent that Stratton’s sim­pler pop forms served his ear­lier work. Here it serves as both a coun­ter­weight to the min­i­mal and gor­geous piano/vocals outro and as a kind of mood-setter, cap­tur­ing an expan­sive, still feel­ing that isn’t eas­ily con­veyable through tra­di­tional song­writ­ing. It’s some­thing we haven’t heard from Strat­ton before, a sound that seems to call to mind wide open land­scapes at dawn, the sun slowly infus­ing the crevices of rocks with its light.

It’s onto this land­scape that Strat­ton projects his melan­choly song, yet there’s some­thing strangely dusty and dis­tant about the sad­ness in “Blue­bells”. The effects obscure his voice just enough to ren­der it ghostly, almost like a voice from the past (you can just barely hear it hov­er­ing behind the gui­tar solos), and the song is nar­rated in the sec­ond per­son, mak­ing it about the lis­tener rather than the singer. It’s a sub­tly alarm­ing shift, putting us in the posi­tion of being hope­lessly lost, rather than safely empathiz­ing with a nar­ra­tor who is hope­lessly lost. The clash­ing gui­tars that rise up around the four minute mark, crack­ling and slash­ing one another like con­tentious bolts of light­ning, infuse the song with a dis­so­nance that, though it dis­ap­pears quickly, enhances this air of des­per­a­tion and sad­ness, espe­cially when we’re lead out into a beau­ti­ful piano and vocal sec­tion only to hear the line “by now you must have been cer­tain that it had all been a lie”. When the nar­ra­tor tells us that we still kept search­ing for our lost love, it’s hard to tell whether it’s sweet or pathetic, and this ambi­gu­ity is crush­ingly sad. Are we deluded or deter­mined? Both? Also to be noted, over the mid­dle sec­tion with it’s min­i­mal back­beat, when Strat­ton is singing “which way did my dar­ling go?”, is the way the bass note on the gui­tar grad­u­ally bends up from the four chord to the five, intro­duc­ing some dis­so­nant inter­me­di­ate notes and a sense of unease and muted vio­lence that wouldn’t be present if he’d just played the chord pro­gres­sion straight.

B-side “The Hud­son Line” is as close to Stratton’s ear­lier work as any­thing he sent us. His voice is stripped of the effects that mask it on “Blue­bells” and left to cut clearly over the beau­ti­ful lat­tice of fin­ger­picked acoustic gui­tar. It is a love song, yet it’s not so much a dec­la­ra­tion of love as an assess­ment of a love that has come and gone. The moments of sweet­ness are now tem­pered by the tem­po­ral dis­tance, and the wist­ful mood is per­fectly cap­tured by the lines “all I know all I know all I know / is all great­ness is born out of sin / but some­how I saw you”. The narrator’s rela­tion­ship with the woman is some­thing born out of sin, yet at the same time it seems to be the one thing that tran­scends this tau­tol­ogy. It’s a sweet­ness that is ren­dered all the sweeter by the dark­ness of the world­view in which it sits. The back­ground against which these lyrics are set is appro­pri­ately lovely and del­i­cate, yet it’s easy to miss just how amaz­ing and skill­ful the rhyth­mic inter­play is between the thumb and the rest of the hand. Strat­ton, though he’s no show off, is an incred­i­bly agile and cre­ative gui­tarist, with a sense of play that allows him to slip away from the expected pat­terns of folk and rock gui­tar. Aside from pro­vid­ing a har­monic back­bone, the gui­tar here fre­quently sub­di­vides the bar into uneven groups of threes, giv­ing the song a rolling feel­ing mir­rored in the lyrics about “gal­lop­ing along the Hud­son Line.”

These exclu­sive tracks rep­re­sent the evoca­tive song­writ­ing Strat­ton is known for, only evolved to the next step. Thank­fully for us lis­ten­ers, he is a per­son who is con­stantly push­ing him­self for­ward, stretch­ing for some­thing just beyond his reach. We have the lux­ury of being able to sit back and immerse our­selves in the dis­cov­er­ies he makes along the way, the beau­ti­ful music that com­poses Will Stratton’s jour­ney through the world. Stay tuned for another dig­i­tal 7” in the com­ing weeks, as well as greater por­tions of the interview.

Gabe Birn­baum

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