Kate Wolf Sings “Across the Great Divide”

Listen to this track by Northern Californian singer-songwriter and country folk paragon Kate Wolf. It’s “Across the Great Divide”, the opening track to the 1981 album Close to You, her fourth. That record built on momentum that Wolf created for herself as an independent musician, initially releasing her material with her band The Wildwood Flower on her self-started Owl label. Her style touches on Sixties folk revivalist ingredients inspired by The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, and The Carter Family as well as from the country music radio she heard growing up in the Fifties.

Wolf achieved local popularity in Sonoma County and then the Bay Area, and soon became a stalwart participant in folk festivals all over North America in the 1970s. She didn’t exactly catch on as a name on the cover of Rolling Stone. Maybe this was because she chose to put her music out on her own label and fashion a career outside of the music industry establishment. She would branch out later in the decade when she signed with indie label Kaleidoscope who released her 1979 record Safe at Anchor. But Wolf would remain an independent artist who put out records on her own terms.

Taking her own path allowed her to craft a unique approach to American folk, bluegrass, and country traditions that put the storytelling aspects of her songwriting to the forefront. That emphasis on narrative and lyrical clarity gives Wolf’s music a warm, plainspoken, and straightforward quality that would inspire a generation of upcoming songwriters including Nanci Griffiths, Iris Dement, and Greg Brown. Wolf also inspired her contemporaries. This included Emmylou Harris who covered Wolf’s material later on.

By the time this song and the Close to You album came out, Wolf had folded The Wildwood Flower after two albums. She regularly toured with Bruce “Utah” Phillips, who would become a venerable and venerated folk music figure in his own right for decades. Phillips took her with him on tours of the Midwest, east coast, and into Canada’s folk music festivals in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. By the end of the Seventies, she established a musical bond with guitarist and mandolinist Nina Gerber who’s guitar lines are prominent here on “Across the Great Divide” as entwined with Wolf’s own.

On this cut, Gerber and the rest of the band, including Norton Buffalo who provides a second lead voice with his harmonica, help Wolf retain the back porch quality that gives her music its warmth and humanity. The instrumentation and arrangements convey an inviting in-the-room feel that lends this song a certain timelessness, defiant of trends, and leaning into the fundamentals of telling relatable musical stories to an audience without flashiness or artifice.

“Across the Great Divide” remains one of Kate Wolf’s strongest artistic statements. It’s concerned with the strangeness of passing time, when events and chapters of one’s life seem both far away and almost like yesterday all at the same time. By the time she wrote this song, she was entering middle age. Beyond the literal geographical reference to the actual continental divide (where rivers really do change direction), whether this life milestone is the metaphorical great divide in the title or not is arguable.

However, this is a phase of life when perspectives change and people find themselves looking back more often than before. When we do that, it can be overwhelming as well as awe-inspiring as we consider those things which are unique to us; our memories, lessons, travels, mistakes, loves, sorrows, joys, connections, challenges, and achievements. Sometimes, our life stories can seem like they happened to a completely different person as we reflect on them. At a certain point in our lives, it becomes easy to say to ourselves where all the years went, I can’t say.

That contemplative space is exactly where this song lives. In this, “Across the Great Divide” has less to do with Kate Wolf as she sings it, and more to do with us as her audience as we hear her sing. And maybe this is a more useful conception of a great divide, metaphorically speaking; an earned awareness that has grown out of experience and how our own sense of mortality shapes our perspectives as we look back on where we’ve been, who we’ve been, and who we’ve become in the bewildering passage of time.

Wolf’s song suggests that an embrace of the mysterious nature of our lives as beings in time is the best way to avoid being in fear of it.

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away

~ “Across the Great Divide” by Kate Wolf

There is a certain defiant hopefulness in this line. Where a song about the passage of time and of mortality could have easily turned down a path defined by ennui, this tune leans toward the light instead. Perhaps this is yet another great divide to consider as we find ourselves on the mountainsides of our lives; that they have been worth living, and that even in their imperfect episodes, they belong to us. As we consider the passing years, we can decide to be content instead of fearful as we straddle the great divide between the edge of night and the break of day.

Kate Wolf put out two more records of original material after Close to You, taking a brief sabbatical at one point, and then resuming her activities on the folk festival circuit and on broadcasts including A Prairie Home Companion and Austin City Limits. In April of 1986, Kate was diagnosed with acute leukemia. After a period of recovery and remission, the disease returned and she underwent a bone marrow transplant. Her immune system never bounced back. She died in December of 1986 at the too-young age of 44, remembered fondly by her fans, musical peers, and celebrated by her friends and family.

Speaking of her family, they established and currently curate the Kate Wolf official website. So, to learn more about her including biographical information and notes on all six of her original albums along with posthumous live and compilation releases, be sure and check that out.

To get a sense of Kate Wolf as a live act, check out this clip of her playing “Like a River” on Austin City Limits. Among other things, you’ll get a sample of Nina Gerber’s considerable skills on the mandolin along with that of fellow player Randy Sabien.

Enjoy!

Joanna Sternberg Sings “I’ve Got Me”

Listen to this track by New York City-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist Joanna Sternberg. It’s “I’ve Got Me”, the title track of their second record that came out in June of 2023. It followed their debut Then I Try Some More from 2019, a record that established their artistic voice as one who leads with stark self-examination, candour, and with a homemade approach to presenting music that is highly personal and universal at the same time. Scoring high marks with critics upon its release, music publications noted that this follow-up revealed greater ambition beyond that debut while still retaining its aural coziness.

Sternberg wrote the songs that appeared on the record during a period of personal transition out of bad relationships and substance use. Putting the new record together had been challenging on other fronts, corresponding with the initial phase of the pandemic. Sternberg included songs they’d tinkered with for many years even before their debut while also writing new ones.

Old and new, the songs are couched in a sound that suggests 1930s dustbowl folk textures meeting with the melodic qualities of the American Songbook. Sternberg’s voice sounds like it belongs to someone you know, singing the tunes as they sit beside you, if not directly for your benefit. In fact, it seems like this song, and others on the record, are necessary for the songwriter to sing, rather than presented primarily as a way to entertain an audience.

Art in general plays an important role for many people to make sense of their lives and existence in a world that often feels so isolating. Even for people without ADHD, autism, and being non-binary as Sternberg is, feelings of self-doubt, self-consciousness in social settings, and struggles with identity and purpose plague many of us.

Navigating the intricacies of relationships and how that corresponds to how we view ourselves in them and outside of them challenges everyone. Sternberg reflects these themes strongly in this tune, which presents many of these struggles upfront. But it also contains a turnaround that captures something that’s equally powerful in everyone’s life.

The song starts off in a bleak but plain-spoken place nested in an undeniable truth; that good or bad, we’re stuck with ourselves. However we present ourselves to the world, or how other people project traits, characteristics, roles, and identities onto us, we can’t escape our own internal voices, fears, doubts, and feelings. When we wake up, there we are. When we go to bed, there we are still.

In between as we engage in the routines and rhythms of our lives, the internal chaos of our histories, perceptions, and anxieties come right along with us. Sometimes those inner demons speak out of turn at exactly the wrong moments. We have our baggage to carry with us, no matter how heavy it is. And the only way forward is through.

“And all my faults and flaws and lies
Are no one’s fault but mine
Between self-hatred and self-awareness
Is a very small thin line
I can’t stop my worry, and my fury
Of all that I’ve done wrong
I waste so much time I mean it
So much time …”

~ “I’ve Got Me” by Joanna Sternberg

Left by itself, this section of the tune might be construed as an exercise in wallowing in self pity, employing stark language that hits like a hammer, in particular the lines between self-hatred and self awareness is a very small thin line and I waste so much time, I mean it, so much time.

But “I’ve Got Me” isn’t a self-pitying statement of suffering, dissatisfaction, or hopelessness. It’s a journey away from it. Sternberg accomplishes this by being upfront with their language, as always. But they also manage to convey a temperature change in their delivery as the song progresses, doing so with great subtlety.

As much as “I’ve Got Me” is about being subject to forces that have shaped us beyond our control, it’s also a song about taking back that control. It’s a statement about ownership and of doing the things that are necessary to set ourselves on the right roads as we see them after making mistakes. This involves taking actions even if those actions seem small.

Why is it so hard to be kind and gentle to myself?
Take the box of self-deprecation
Lock it and put it on the shelf
Then wait five days, take that box
Throw it in the fire
Maybe one day
Oh, yeah
One fine day

“I’ve Got Me” catches the song’s narrator at a point of realization. They haven’t quite put their self-doubt and insecurity to rest. But the vision for how to do that is here. “I’ve Got Me” is a declaration. It’s a manifestation that if laying down one’s burdens can be pictured, then it’s also achievable. By putting it in a song, the song itself becomes a vehicle for emancipation for its author, just by singing it. For us, it models our own struggles and therefore reminds us that we aren’t as alone and powerless as we think.

In this, “I’ve Got Me” isn’t a diary entry or even primarily a means of art therapy for its author. It’s also an expression of empathy and care for anyone who feels a bit lost and unsure of their own worth sometimes. It acknowledges that the act of pushing through struggles, baggage, and pain is a human reality beyond just a single set of circumstances. The implicit takeaway in “I’ve Got Me” is a call for self-love in the midst of that, no matter who we are or what we’re carrying around with us.

By the end of two minutes and change of a running time, Sternberg’s tune can be as much about us as it is about them. We’ve all got ourselves, warts and all. But we’ve also got ourselves; whole universes of warm emotions, treasured memories, unique perspectives, and possibilities that the world has never seen the like of ever before.

Joanna Sternberg is an active musician, songwriter, and visual artist today. You can learn more about them at joannasternberg.com

For more on Joanna Sternberg and the role that songwriting and making art plays in their life, check out this 2023 interview on Pitchfork.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #folkPop #joannaSternberg #singerSongwriters #songsAboutExistence

XTC Play “The Wheel and the Maypole”

Listen to this track by legendary Swindonian progressive pop music heroes XTC. It’s “The Wheel and the Maypole”, the final track on the band’s final record, 2000’s Wasp Star (Apple Venus, Vol. 2). That record was the follow up to 1999’s Apple Venus Vol. 1 of course. Both records were originally meant to be two parts of a double album. But things didn’t go according to plan on that front and on a few others besides that. This wasn’t anything new for XTC even by 1999 and into 2000.

The production budget fell short of the band’s ambitions for their planned double album. That meant having to make some compromises. One of those was the decision to put out two separate volumes instead of a double and also instead of producing a single disc made up of the best of the two batches of songs they planned to record. The single-disc option was put forward by guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, and arranger Dave Gregory. But primary XTC writer and singer Andy Partridge’s idea was not to “mix the flavours”. If not as two parts of a double record, he wanted to present the songs in the way they were originally conceived as two distinct packages; “orch-oustic” songs on one disc, and clanging guitar pop on the other.

Recording sessions for the first volume were fussy affairs. Due to disputes and personal conflicts coming to a head during the sessions, the band suffered a significant loss when Dave Gregory left the group, having been a member since 1979. This left the band’s principal songwriters Partridge and bassist-singer Colin Moulding as XTC’s sole members. As good as the material is on Wasp Star even without Gregory’s involvement – this is still XTC we’re talking about here, after all – they were heading toward the end of their road together. But even so, they still had plenty to say as a band that fit in very well with potent sets of themes that listeners can trace throughout the Apple Venus material and in their catalogue as a whole.

“The Wheel and the Maypole” reflects many of the things the band had been writing about since 1986’s landmark Skylarking album at least. It’s a latter day quintessential XTC track that connects the concepts of love, mortality, and the cycles of nature together into a single statement. Not a bad way to cap off what turned out to be their final album. As an arrangement, the song melds the two approaches on each of the volumes, with jangly guitar-based rock that marks the second volume meeting the delicate strings and woodwinds of the first.

“The Wheel and the Maypole” emerged out of two ideas for songs Partridge was tinkering with that turned out to fit very well together. Like the two sets of songs for their respective volumes, the combination contains a vital duality. One section concerns the metaphorical earthen pot to hold the love between two people, complete with rural and earthy sexual imagery; plows and furrows, rabbits and burrows, seeds and valleys, and sticks with Aunt Sally’s head. The latter is a reference to a casual game played in rural English pubs and gardens. This section is about building things up, building them bigger all around to hold the things we make as we strive toward whatever earthly goals we’ve got in mind for ourselves.

The other section of the song is decidedly more cosmic in scale. It has less to do with building up and more to do with the exact opposite, with stars and planets falling apart, feeding each other, and then being reborn into new heavenly bodies over eons of time. The contrast between the earthbound first section and the more celestial second section is striking. Yet, both these expressions of nature are related. “The Wheel and the Maypole” is about how the universe unfolds in relation to our lives, our world, and everything we experience through our limited perception filters that make everything around us seem so fixed and permanent to us.

“The Wheel and the Maypole” makes the point that, when we realize how limited our perceptions are, knowledge of the finite nature of our lives and of everything we know can be a source of enlightenment, not despair:

Yes, everything decays
Forest tumbles down to make the soil
Planets fall apart
Just to feed the stars and stuff their larders

And what made me think we’re any better
And what made me think we’d last forever
Was I so naive?
Of course it all unweaves …

~ “The Wheel and the Maypole” by XTC

As the maypole dance of life continues, the ties that bind us to the world will eventually unwind until all is undone, and the wheel turns to start the dance all over again. This is not good or bad. It’s just something that is. The question is: what do we do with ourselves in the interim? Given that everything decays, ends, and becomes transformed, why not consider what that means and what we can do before everything unfolds and unwinds? How do we make our lives as meaningful as we can, use our time as well as we can, and make our world as safe and welcoming to as many people as we can?

Because, what else is there?

Besides the powerful existential takeaways in this song, “The Wheel and the Maypole” also feels like a retroactive comment on the band that put it out as the last song on their last album. Of course things fall apart over time, even after having gone through the fire together as a band. The fact that this song is so celebratory, so characteristic, so joyous, so rocking, makes the prospect of things coming to an end for XTC to be less a sad occasion, and more an expression of contented resignation, ownership, and pride over what they made together. What better way to end a unique and valuable run as a group who always stayed true to their artistic vision despite resistance and to the delight of fans from all over the world?

XTC broke up quietly but officially in 2006.

Andy Partridge is an active songwriter and label owner today, lending his talents to various projects over the years in collaboration with other artists. You can learn more about his recent activities and buy official XTC releases and merch at ape.uk.net. To learn more about his songwriting process, and to get a great sense of him as a raconteur as well as a pop writer, check out the Andy Partridge interview on Sodajerker.

After a period away from the music business, Colin Moulding put out two new releases with former XTC drummer Terry Chambers under the name TC & I; 2017’s 4-track EP Great Aspirations and 2019’s live document Naked Flames. The duo recorded the latter in their hometown of Swindon and included several XTC gems in their set list. You can learn about how they came together in this interview on Billboard.com.

If it’s more XTC music you crave, you can always review this list of 20 great XTC songs, also written by your humble host.

Finally, if you haven’t checked out the excellent 2017 XTC documentary This is Pop, do yourself a favour. You can watch the trailer for the movie right here.

Enjoy!

#2000sMusic #AndyPartridge #songsAboutExistence #XTC

Emma Swift Sings “I Contain Multitudes”

Listen to this track by superb singer, songwriter, and major Bob Dylan fan Emma Swift. It’s “I Contain Multitudes”, a cut from her excellent 2020 release Blonde on the Tracks. That release is a collection of her interpretations of Dylan’s material across eras. She embarked on the project during a trying time in her life as she struggled with a bout of depression, a condition she’s suffered from for many years. On top of that, she had writer’s block. Setting aside the burden of having to come up with original material, Swift decided that recording some of her favourite music would help her to reset her love for singing and recording. Bob Dylan’s music was at the top of the list.

In kicking off what turned out to be a whole album of Dylan interpretations, Emma Swift became a part of a wider musical tradition. Interpreting Dylan’s material has produced a treasure trove of superb music from artists across the decades and the musical spectrum, proving his work to be highly adaptable, inviting and even challenging as singers and musicians strive to imprint each song of his with their own musical signatures. It’s a challenge that many have risen to, starting in the Sixties and continuing with great aplomb into the 21st century.

Swift’s record stood out when she released it in full by August of 2020, making an impact even among old guard critics and notoriously fussy Dylanologists. Maybe it’s because Swift was bolder than most when it came to her choice of material. Avoiding the obvious go-to Dylan songs throughout her album, this song was a more recent composition. In fact, it was literally the most recent Dylan song by the time Swift’s version came out, with the original appearing only a month before hers. With the boldness of a move like that, the song had to deliver the goods. Emma Swift does this on several levels at once, making her interpretation a stand-out in the grand history of Bob Dylan covers.

Bob Dylan released “I Contain Multitudes” in April of 2020 as a precursor to his newest record Rough and Rowdy Ways on which the song also appears. “I Contain Multitudes” borrows its title from Walt Whitman. But its subject matter is pure Dylan, delving into a set of themes that have informed and characterized his approach to fame, personas, stage presentation, and even the voices he’s used throughout his career to keep fans, and perhaps even himself, on their toes.

In stylistically and even lyrically re-jigging of his own material over years and decades on stage, his work follows the folk song tradition that there is no canonical version of any song. Instead, every song of his (maybe barring “Love Minus Zero/No Limit“) is a canvas for spontaneous performance rather than a sacred text that one must adhere to line for line, note for note, style for style. “I Contain Multitudes” carries a related idea; that everything in the universe is also constantly on the move and nothing is truly fixed. This includes one’s own sense of self, fashioned by perceptions, contexts, circumstance, the passage of time, and even one’s mood in a given moment.

That brings us to Emma Swift’s interpretation of this song. Her version seemed to land from out of nowhere as a single on the very heels of the original in May of the same year and near enough to Dylan’s 79th birthday, no less. Were this any other artist but Bob Dylan, that move on Swift’s part might be interpreted as an act of artistic brazenness, or even as a kind of a stunt. But this Dylan song could be considered his most upfront expression of the well-traveled themes found throughout his catalogue; the nature of identity, wearing masks and discarding them, and bristling at attempts to impose interpretations as hard-coded graven images. On that score alone, this Bob Dylan song cried out to be covered right from the jump.

Emma Swift’s version is remarkable on several fronts with all of this in mind. To start, she was the first to do it which is an achievement by itself. Covering “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” is one thing. But this was another beast entirely on a logistics level alone. She only had a little over a month to learn it, get inside of it, lay it down, and then release it. Tonally, she hits this song dead center, deftly communicating its core message with nuance and precision; that the world is constantly in flux, and by extension so are we all.

“I sing the songs of experience like William Blake
I have no apologies to make
Everything’s flowing all at the same time
I live on the boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes.”

-Emma Swift, Bob Dylan’s “I Contain Multitudes”

As far as tone and texture, her voice and Dylan’s could not be more different on their respective versions and otherwise, although Swift’s seems just as out of time as anything Bob himself ever laid down; a classic country-folk voice with just a dash of torch singer ennui, evoking mythical musical landscapes across epochs. Swift finds the gravitas from inside her own interpretative heart and lays it bare here in what amounts to a story about feeling misunderstood, and wanting to connect in an authentic way. In doing so, she captures the central human conundrum that being truly known can often feel impossible as much as we all seek it. In the lonely period of depression as she was making this, no wonder the song resonated so well with her.

Most of all, her performance reaches the brass ring when it comes to reinterpreting the work of another artist. She makes this song sound as if she’s written it herself, unchanged gender perspectives and all. The effect of that makes this song more of an affirmation of the whole human experience, and less of a song about one very famous man weary of fixed identities projected onto him. In Swift’s artistic eye and through her voice, “I Contain Multitudes” becomes something more universal. If Bob Dylan wrote and sang it as a statement about his own complexity, Swift sings it here to reflect everyone’s.

Given that she undertook the project as a means to ride out her depression, her version’s sense of universality is truly remarkable as a vital and life-affirming work. What might have been thought of as just an audacious artistic coup in releasing a Dylan cover in such close succession to the original becomes something more valuable and viable; an act of pure expression that’s infused with affection and great generosity that carries an essential truth along with it; that we are all people of contradictions and of many moods. We all contain multitudes. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s wonderful.

Emma Swift is an active singer and songwriter today. You can learn more about her at emmaswift.com.

For more on Emma Swift, her admiration of Bob Dylan’s work, and how his songs helped her to get herself going artistically during a very challenging period, have a read of this article from thebrag.com.

As to Emma Swift’s struggle with depression and the toll it’s taken on her that includes her finances, she launched a Go Fund Me campaign. At the time of this writing, that campaign remains open. Learn more about that and consider donating to it right here.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #BobDylan #coverVersions #EmmaSwift #songsAboutExistence

Eels Play “The Deconstruction”

Listen to this track by the distinguished gentleman of Los Feliz, California and his merry band of musical compadres, EELS. It’s “The Deconstruction”, the opening track from 2018’s album of the same name that served as something of a comeback for head writer and creative head Mark Oliver Everett aka E. This was after a four-year hiatus period as a musician, which may not seem like a lot in the late 2010s for most outfits. But up until that point, Everett put out records at a furious pace, and toured them just as rigourously at a near-continuous rate from the late Nineties. On a productivity cadence like that, it’s no wonder E needed a break after 2014’s The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett.

In those intervening years between releases, E’s personal life became more complicated. He got married and became a father. Then, he got divorced. That’s quite a rollercoaster ride of experiences in a relatively short period of time. Any one of those events would be enough to give a fella an existential kick in the pants to make him re-think things. That’s certainly reflected in the material that eventually appeared on the album. These are songs E wrote during a time when he considered abandoning his music career altogether, never considering that his new material would make for a cohesive record.

What is evident on the album that came out of all that and certainly on this song was that E kept true to his approach of self-examination in his work. Specifically, one of his stalwart themes of putting the past behind to make way for life in the present takes center stage here with a streak or two of irony to balance it all out. But how does this song and approach represent an evolution for a guy who’s made a career out of examining his own shortcomings and errors in song?

Since at least 1996 and the release of Beautiful Freak, E has become notable as a songwriter unafraid to stare his own insecurities square in the eye. From themes of loneliness, failure, redemption, joy in the small things, longing for love and connection, gratitude, and the grim reality of human mortality, he never wavered in his songwriting at drawing connections to these themes in his own life for the benefit of his audience. It’s this sense of emotional and even spiritual resonance that marks his work as singular. Another theme of course is that of survival, and those mechanisms that carry a human being through life as unpredictable as it is. Presumably, this includes songwriting.

“The Deconstruction” questions all of that, asking: what would happen if we tore that all down? What would remain when we did that, and what would we build up in its place? During a period of deliberate deviation from his usual breakneck routine of recording and touring, and coming into a new era of parenthood and partnerhood all at once, it was a potent question to consider even for the man who has written songs about getting over events and having to start over since his career began.

A four-year break allowed him the time to undertake the process after over twenty years of being a musician constantly on the go, turning his life’s trials into grist for his art. With his signature lyrical candour it’s easy to think that for Mark Oliver Everett, even the act of writing songs about pain, loss, and personal missteps is all a part of the big mess that needed examining and, possibly, also needed dismantling along with everything else that served as the pillars to an old way of life. This may explain a lot about his four-year hiatus as he worked all of this out.

The reconstruction will begin
Only when there’s nothing left
But little pieces on the floor
They’re made of what I was
Before I had to break it down

-“The Deconstruction”, EELS

There’s a certain amount of irony that remains for a songwriter presenting a song about, possibly, not writing songs to work through problems, but rather doing the work of self-examination without thinking about how it will fit on a new album. There is a further irony still that this resulted in a comeback record and one that seems like a callback to the quasi-Trip Hop sound of EELS’ first album that kicked the whole thing off.

Here’s the thing with EELS, though. The songs aren’t just about their author, even if he does tend to sing in the first person a lot of the time. They’re also about the audience. The question of what would happen if we really examined ourselves with a mind to remove assumptions and kick out bad patterns in our lives is as pertinent to us as it is to the person who wrote this song. How far are we willing to go with that? What will it mean for us when we do? These are real head-scratchers that are worth asking for all of us who are trying to make our way through this thing called life, whatever it is.

That’s where “The Deconstruction” really breaks through. Any background information about its author’s motivations for writing it are secondary once we begin to think about the song’s implications for ourselves. Whatever barriers E felt he had to break down at the time, his calling to capture what it is to be alive, human, and flawed remains in place. Valid deconstruction projects and personal journeys aside, we can always count on E’s honesty and his drive to reflect the struggles of his audience as we try to make sense of things, even if our own apparatuses for doing so are often just as flawed.

For more about Mark Oliver Everett just after his hiatus period and around the time The Deconstruction first came out in 2018, listen to this 44-minute NPR interview with E of EELS. In it, he talks about what this song means, what the benefits of following its advice might be, and what this reveals about him as an artist and as a person.

To explore the recurring themes of personal journeys and life’s sometimes harsh lessons found in Mark Oliver Everett’s work, check out these 20 Great Songs by EELS.

Otherwise, there’s always eelstheband.com.

Enjoy!

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#2010sMusic #Eels #MarkOliverEverett #songsAboutExistence #songsAboutHealing