AEM089 Will Stratton

This is the sec­ond of two Will Strat­ton dig­i­tal sin­gles to grace Ampeater’s pages in the last few months. For some more back­ground info, I’d rec­om­mend check­ing out the first one.

Both the songs on Will Stratton’s sec­ond Ampeater sin­gle deal with the con­fu­sions of love lost and found. It’s pretty tra­di­tional ground for pop songs, but unlike most pop music, which rev­els in the heat of the moment, in emo­tions flat­tened and com­pressed into uni­ver­sal banal­i­ties, these songs are deeply per­sonal and con­tem­pla­tive. Rather than wal­low in the first over­heated flush of love or self-pitying pall of loss, they look back­ward with a sub­tler, more mature brand of anger or desire.

Anchored by Stratton’s breathy vocals and intel­li­gent lyrics (whether they’re hov­er­ing in a sea of dreamy elec­tric gui­tars as on A-side “Lying in the Dark” or rid­ing a wave of fierce fin­ger­pick­ing, as on B-side “Do You Remem­ber the Morn­ing”), they don’t pre­tend to resolve into easy, clear emo­tions but instead draw out the con­tra­dic­tory feel­ings that are always a part of love affairs, whether or not we like to admit it to our­selves at the time.

In “Lying in the Dark”, a song that revolves wholly around the untrust­wor­thi­ness of truth, Stratton’s nar­ra­tor seems torn between fling­ing hurt­ful words at an ex-lover who has clearly hurt him and reveal­ing the hon­est but now tainted.  At dif­fer­ent points in the song, he tells her why didn’t I just tell you/ you’re pretty but I never felt a thing / ’cause that would be a lie and then fol­lows this con­fes­sion with and every night I’d pray/for some­thing inter­est­ing to say/but you never even caused a sin­gle spark. Which of those state­ments is true? Both, per­haps. It’s com­pli­cated and full of uncer­tainty and unre­solved emo­tions, just like actual rela­tion­ships. This will­ing­ness to explore what is ambigu­ous and shift­ing is one of the things I admire most about Stratton’s songs, as the way we expe­ri­ence the world doesn’t digest so eas­ily as the radio would have you believe.

Nearly the entire song is under­scored with hazy elec­tric gui­tar pick­ing and light, sim­ple drum­work, which forms a sooth­ingly repet­i­tive back­drop for the lyrics, but instead of just allow­ing this del­i­cate frame to carry the song gen­tly into and out of your ears, Strat­ton uses it to set up a moment of supreme yet sub­tle drama in which, after the sec­ond verse, lit­er­ally every­thing drops out except for one elec­tric gui­tar. This gui­tar plays a fiery solo that pushes and pulls the time and meter, adding and drop­ping beats and notes in a way that con­veys the depth of the emo­tion at hand, the shaky ground described. It sounds almost as if it is brim­ming over with anger, a vio­lence that Stratton’s voice never touches, and when the rest of the instru­ments return, exactly the same way they left, it leaves you with the feel­ing of hav­ing just watched some­one who is usu­ally extremely com­posed burst out shout­ing in the mid­dle of an argu­ment and then just as quickly return to nor­malcy. The light drums and airy gui­tars sound the same but they are not the same.

This sin­gle also car­ries on the motif I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous review of stretch­ing Stratton’s pre­vi­ous records’ pretty, fin­ger­picked folk songs, expand­ing the forms and tech­niques enough to make them slightly more elu­sive and thus even more reward­ing upon repeated lis­tens. This exper­i­men­ta­tion with form stems from Stratton’s inter­est in capital-c Com­po­si­tion (you will recall from the last review his famil­iar­ity with all sorts of mod­ern clas­si­cal com­posers I hadn’t heard of, and I will add here that he stud­ied the sub­ject at Ben­ning­ton Col­lege), some­thing that started all the way back in his high school days:

Ever since I fan­ci­fully started con­sid­er­ing myself a com­poser of seri­ous music when I was in high school, I have led a dual musi­cal exis­tence, where on a good week I would write (mean­ing make up and remem­ber through rep­e­ti­tion) a lit­tle ABAB-form song about love or lone­li­ness or fate or whatever, and the next day I would write (mean­ing actu­ally write down) a spiky, mean­der­ing, Gnossienne-ish minia­ture for piano. Things approached a more absurd dis­con­nect when I was work­ing on my sec­ond record, because I was record­ing songs that were more pol­ished and preen­ing than any­thing I had ever attempted before, and at the same time I was com­pos­ing some pretty strange music heav­ily inspired by peo­ple like George Crumb and Earle Brown, music full of heavy silences and seag­ull glis­san­dos and inde­ter­mi­nate notation.

The songs here haven’t ven­tured into Crumb ter­ri­tory yet, but they take the ABAB pop song for­mat and remove the rigid­ity of tempo and exag­ger­ated dif­fer­ences between verses and cho­rus.  Instead of mark­ing each sec­tion as clearly as pos­si­ble, they flow nat­u­rally and organ­i­cally from sec­tion to sec­tion, and only by stop­ping and think­ing about it can one see the seams. “Do You Remem­ber the Morn­ing” begins with the title phrase, built up in frag­ments of increas­ing length from do you to do you remem­ber the morn­ing, all of it hang­ing over some low, rubato gui­tar chords. Strat­ton really likes to play with rhyth­mic accents as well as meter, and you can hear that here in the way he empha­sizes the upbeat of the first note of each bar, around 1:25. These strange emphases take a song built on just acoustic gui­tar and vocals, like so many oth­ers, and turn it into some­thing that main­tains a sense of mys­tery and intact­ness, aided by immense skill of Stratton’s gui­tar play­ing. The whirling solo brings out some of the same inten­sity of emo­tion here, again serv­ing as the emo­tional apex of the song, yet here the energy is more pos­i­tive, desire rather than recrim­i­na­tion (okay, maybe a lit­tle bit of both. After all, love is complicated).

Talk­ing about For­est Fire last week, I men­tioned how excit­ing it is (not to men­tion how much it speaks of the via­bil­ity and impor­tance of the musi­cian in an age of end­lessly repro­ducible dig­i­tal record­ings) to hear a band who take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity, as human beings with instru­ments and imag­i­na­tions, to play their songs dif­fer­ently each time. Strat­ton is a per­fect exam­ple of some­one who falls into that cat­e­gory, as evi­denced by his recent WNYC Spin­ning On Air per­for­mance, which includes alter­nate ver­sions of each of the songs on this sin­gle (“Lying in the Dark” winds up in a whole dif­fer­ent time sig­na­ture and “Do You Remem­ber the Morn­ing” is slightly accel­er­ated and a bit more fre­netic). As I said in the first piece, matu­rity and musi­cian­ship aren’t exactly the things that set the blogs a buzzing, at least not as much as they ought to, but when it comes to mak­ing music that has stay­ing power and sig­nif­i­cance beyond what the lat­est hyphen­ated genre trend hap­pens to be, Will Strat­ton is a pretty great per­son to be right now.

Gabe Birn­baum

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