The Retrographer, Issue 96 (November, 2 0 2 2)

December 18, 2022

Olli Hirvonen, Klein, DESTIN CONRAD, Ian Wayne, Wizkid, Daniel Avery, Phoenix, The Bird Calls, Bill Callahan, Weyes Blood, Tom Petty, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 96 (November, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for November, 2 0 2 2 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Erode”, Olli Hirvonen (Spotify / YouTube) – Christian McBride recently said anything that can’t be characterized gets called jazz, and this Finnish guitarist’s beautiful latest work, which is if anything more like slowcore, fits the rule. He is free to drone, loop, dig in, let the listener feel more than hear.

“black star”, Klein (Spotify / YouTube) – A simple, eerie riff and a cycling refrain is increasingly altered by effects as its mounting distress accumulates, minimalist production matched by maximalist expression.

“ON 10”, DESTIN CONRAD (Spotify / YouTube) – A child star on Vine, now spinning slow-burning love songs, drums building without release, horns slowly emerging through misty filters.

“Molloy”, Ian Wayne (Spotify / YouTube) – Best heard in the exquisite architecture of his latest album, Wayne catwalks between dream and reality, inner monologue and soliloquy, self and the stranger within.

“Balance”, Wizkid (Spotify / YouTube) – A heavy, thumping groove, smooth saxophone, and Wiz’s cooing come-ons; time to let go and give yourself over to the music.

“Ultra Truth”, Daniel Avery (Spotify / YouTube) – like Jon Hopkins or Clark, Avery’s electronica steps ever upward on laser beam synthesizers and seismic drums, powerful yet graceful.

“Season 2”, Phoenix (Spotify / YouTube) – Thomas Mars knows how to be a rockstar, yet shimmers as a popstar, glinting under the mirrorball amid scintillating arpeggiators and thrumming bass.

“Auditioning For The Part”, The Bird Calls (Spotify / YouTube) – Sodomsky can spin a song that maintains its focus, conceit, concept. Like the great country writers, he dances with the one who brought him, finding humor and drama in it without ever abandoning it for a shiny object.

“Natural Information”, Bill Callahan (Spotify / YouTube) – Callaghan’s sonorous baritone so often narrates romance, loss, or confusion, but now celebrates the simple purity of love, fatherhood, and renewal.

“God Turn Me Into a Flower”, Weyes Blood (Spotify / YouTube) – One of the true classic voices of her generation, one which would stand alongside any chanteuse or torch-singer of yesteryear. When Natalie Mering’s voice bends soulfully around the lyric “you shatter easily”, it’s both human and beyond reach.

One Album Playlist for November, 2 0 2 2

In May I decided to revisit an album that hadn’t previously clicked for me, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn The Torpedoes. Petty had never won my devotion; I liked “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “American Girl” and knew those songs perfected a certain kind of songwriting, but had never taken a closer look. I made up my mind at some point in my late teens that he was middle-of-the-road. I remember watching his 2008 Super Bowl halftime performance, turning to my friend Sean and sneering (in that arrogant way only a college freshman can), that “Tom Petty personifies mediocrity.” What a tryhard; As if the cavalcade of beloved songs he marched through in those 12 minutes netted out to a middling strain of American music. 

It’s odd for me to relate to that dismissiveness now. I think I felt that rock could be more experimental, or colorful, or edgy than the setlist the Heartbreakers picked to please America’s largest TV viewership. I was listening to a lot of Radiohead and wearing white wayfarers around my campus; defining myself in contrast to a mainstream, however arbitrarily defined, was vital to my fledgling and fragile identity. It was transparent. But at that time, Petty’s sound, its hegemony on the FM rock radio I grew up on, and the incursion of bands who, with samplers and Korgs, sought to sound as dissimilar from “Runnin’ Down A Dream'' as they could inspired a thoughtless derision that stuck for almost a decade and a half.

But this past May, in that funny unpredictable way that music often does, Damn the Torpedoes revealed itself and sent me down as deep a rabbit hole as I’ve ever fallen into for any artist. What previously scanned as perfectly safe registered as impossibly perfect. His catalog of great songs yawned bottomlessly, where even album cuts and unreleased songs shone like gems. His ensemble stood out first: from the shimmering jangle of his guitars, to Mike Campbell’s endlessly singable solos, to Ron Blair and Howie Epstein’s singing basslines, to Benmont Tench’s glimmering organ sounds, and Stan Lynch and Steve Ferrone’s foundational drumming. I was amazed to find that I never disliked an album – rarely disliked a single song – across his five decades. 

I wasn’t a songwriter when I first passed judgment on him; I am now. Beholding the magnitude of his corpus awed me. How many years would it take me to write even one album this good? Could I ever? With this ease and craftsmanship, humor and tunefulness? How many lifetimes would it take? His melodies drew from rock and country in original ways; Melodic approaches he applied to the most classic chord progressions felt fresh. His band grooved better than they had right to be. As a vocalist he was a great actor, capable of shapeshifting among a diversity of characters – the podunk hayseed, the jilted lover, the bemused stoner, the heart-eyed lover, the weary wiseman – yet still unmistakably himself. 

At the center of it all are his lyrics, whose simplicity and clarity I had previously read as commonplace but which now bled with yearning, sadness, hope, passion. I fell for his protagonists: The confuddled old coot peering out bloodshot eyes at underage scenesters traipsing through LA in “Zombie Zoo” (it’s the burnout’s “Hey Nineteen”: he dates himself with the quip “you look like Boris Karloff and you don’t even care”, but snickering stoned to himself he couldn’t care less if the little shits get it, pleased to be over the hill); the sniffling, heartbroken lover with a lump in his throat putting two-and-two together on “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)”; the panicking pretty-boy with a sweaty brow fending off an amorous admirer hoping his girlfriend doesn’t kill him on “What Are You Doin’ In My Life?”; the shaded castoff just looking for escape in “You Don’t Know How It Feels”’s emancipatory joint. Even songs I’d heard endlessly prior, like “American Girl” opened up to me like a secret trap door to a hidden library below, as full of liberating abandon and American essentialism as the best Springsteen songs.

Over the ensuing months I’ve given multiple listens to every Tom Petty album, solo and with the Heartbreakers; all his live albums; all his b-sides; the reunion of his old band Mudcrutch and even their live record. I watched the YouTube Wildflowers feature; I took in the four-hour Peter Bogdonavich documentary Running Down A Dream. I still wanted more when it finished. I started learning his songs. I memorized his words more easily than any artist I’ve ever connected to. I tried to learn Mike Campbell’s slide parts and listened to podcast after podcast of interviews with him until the stories started to repeat. My connection to Petty felt so natural, it was like finding a lost album of family photos.

Throughout, I asked myself how his music could be so immediate after such a long time. I know why I had dismissed him, but why had I now taken to him? It couldn’t just be my amazement at his artisanship. What was it about his music, and my own preferences, that had made my affection so strong once it unlocked my attention?

When Kurt Cobain broke through with Nirvana, he was disturbed at how different his own audience was from him. He wrote “In Bloom” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to reject the meatheads who amassed at his shows finding perverse aggression in the power of his music in spite of his own beliefs. Tom Petty too had a complicated relationship with his fans, sometimes pandering to their worst characteristics and other times standing up to them. He attracted an audience that variably represented the music he made, or better said reflected it in ways he couldn’t have anticipated or controlled. After these countless hours listening, it’s clear that the songwriter behind one of the greatest songbooks can’t be easily described by the fanbase he begat.

Petty once said, “I don’t like to get too autobiographical, because I don’t feel I’m that interesting.” Putting listeners off the scent is an old writerly trick to protect the interpretability of their art, and I feel particularly disinclined to believe him. If, more than his fanbase, his music is to be interpreted as a reflection of his own personality, stories, and perspectives, he offered inculcations of his beliefs and dispositions. And he seemed to like to hint at an underlying autobiography; On “A Mind With A Heart Of It’s Own”, he declares, apropos of nothing, “my middle name is Earl.” It is.

When his catalog is taken in as completely as I just have, trends emerge, inclinations which suggest abiding interests and persistent personal characteristics. He seemed to write the same song again and again, trying to tell a story better and better, or find the right melody for a set of chords, or the right meter for a strumming pattern. Figures recur. He depicts a poor kid, a backwoods southerner growing up in a college town, an old soul flummoxed by a new world, a hippie who fiercely guarded his freedom and refused to flinch at a threat, a musician in it for the music. He ultimately became well known for his toughness with his 1989 “I Won’t Back Down”, but this theme arose again and again in his work: In his unreleased “Walkin’ From The Fire” he shouted “I’ll fight like a tiger, don’t put me in the corner”; He playfully lamented those “trying to control me” on the unreleased “You Come Through”; “Rebels”, which this child of segregationist Florida regrettably wrapped in the Confederate flag, carries this attribute into a broader narrative of defiance at any cost.

This fearlessness turned into intense and successful opposition to the record industry, especially in his winning battle against MCA during his late-70s “Lawsuit Tour”, his label, regarding ownership of his music prior to Damn The Torpedoes, and his subsequent battle to keep the price of its followup Hard Promises down. He covered his heroes The Byrds’ calloused “So You Want to be A Rock and Roll Star” during the Southern Accents tour to recount this time, and wrote an entire anti-corporate concept album, The Last DJ, excoriating the music business on songs like the title track, “Can’t Stop The Sun” and “Joe”.

But for all his principled hardheadedness, Petty knew that much of his combativeness was in his own head: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway”, he sang in “Crawling Back To You”. As much as he liked to sing about his conflicts, he preferred to sing about his loves, chief among them music. He loved singing about how much he loved singing as much on his first album, with “Anything That’s Rock and Roll”, as he did a quarter century later remembering the sound of the radio on “Dreamville”. He serenaded his instruments themselves, as well as the Heartbreakers Clubhouse, on the Wilburys’ “Cool Dry Place”, the sort of delightful throwaway that Petty seemed to be able to make up on the spot. That preternatural penchant for songwriting, the way that stories like “Girl On LSD” could just flow right out from him, was both marvelous and unpretentious.

Petty was as much a romantic about music as he was about the idea of being in a great band. The Heartbreakers’ remarkably long run, from 1976 until Petty’s death in 2017, is ultimately about Petty’s belief that staying together mattered. This again derived from a reverence for the music. Like many classic bands, the Heartbreakers began as a cover band, and found continuing inspiration in playing their favorites by other artists to contextualize their work, energize and center the band, and prompt their own creativity. So much of their best work – say, “You Don’t Know How It Feels”, derived from Steve Miller’s “The Joker”, or “American Girl”, which began from the Bo Diddley riff, or “The Waiting”, which grabbed an iconic Byrds guitar figure, or the “A Hard Day’s Night”-style sus2 chord used on “Even The Losers” – grew from the rich soil of the band’s cover repertoire, and as such sits beautifully alongside it as it advanced the music.

Even so, so many of Petty’s best songs are without precedent. Little anticipated “Learning To Fly” or the wisdom and melancholy of “Free Fallin’”. It has been said many times that Petty’s innate ability to spin apothegmatic lyrics, hiding profundity behind a benign voice and cheshire half-grin. He made it easy to miss the dramatic duality of “I’m free/free-falling”, its desperation hiding in plain sight. Generations found triumph serenading American girls despite the desperate moments, right there in song’s acme, of “something that's so close, and still so far out of reach.”

One of my favorite Tom Petty figures lives within a song where he isn’t even the main character. In “Shadow Of A Doubt (A Complex Kid)”, a Damn Thé Torpedoes album cut, the narrator simply puzzles at the woman he loves. She constantly keeps him guessing and sleeptalks in French, but he’s so fascinated by her that he waits outside her job for her shift to finish just so she can tell him how much she hates her boss. His reverence remains seemingly private, but in his inner world the listener beholds true love and admiration, which he thinks might be reciprocated (even though she don’t wanna let on).

My review of his work has been exhaustive, and it’s reflected in this playlist. And yet, I could go further. There’s his Del Shannon record, his work with Roger McGuinn, his time as the backing band for Johnny Cash, the time the Heartbreakers toured as Bob Dylan’s band for two years, his work with the Wilburys. The place where Petty’s catalog ends and others begins is hard to measure and arbitrary to define. The scale of admiration he earned from his peers is startling. He arrived a decade or more after the foundational heroes of rock, but won their love and admiration. He cowrote Roy Orbison’s “You Got It”, had Ringo and George Harrison on his records and in his videos, was idolized by Stevie Nicks and duetted by Lindsay Buckingham, was eulogized by Paul McCartney and Phoebe Bridgers and Sheryl Crow. After his passing Dylan performed the third verse of “Learning to Fly'' like a requiem. That ode to fighting on – despite hardship, despite uncertainty – sounds like resolution, yet only testifies to indomitable perseverance:

Now some say life

Will beat you down

Break your heart

Steal your crown

So I started out

For God knows where

I guess I'll know

When I get there

Tom Petty died five years ago this October, less than 3 weeks before turning 67. He had plans to keep going: Decades before, that birthday held significance: “So as long as somebody is willing to listen, I’ll do it,” he said back in 1982. “Hell, Muddy Waters is only 67.”

His death was tragic and accidental. His relationships, with Mike Campbell, who he never let out of his orbit for even the most far-flung side projects, or Benmont Tench, the godfather of his daughter, seemed like they would only continue to bear fruit. Surely the songs that poured forth from him would have continued unencumbered as they always had. Instead, his songbook is closed and filed so tightly into the top shelf of American music that it might be missed, or taken for granted, but will never be too far from inspiring listeners.

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