Album Review
4.5 Stars
By Anthony Kuzminski
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “life is a journey, not a destination”. I’m overtly optimistic person and I truly believe that no matter how successful an artist becomes that they believe that each film, poem, book, song or album is part of the ongoing journey. However, this isn’t always the case. All too often people become consumed with perception and there’s nothing worse than failure, so instead of following their hearts, they follow the money. As a result, they become far too content with their life and become numb to everything around them and they end up at a dead destination sidetracking their journey. Fortunately Butch Walker hasn’t fallen under this career inflicting spell. When Walker released Letters in 2004, you could feel the throbbing earnestness of his pain. This automatically gave him credibility; brutal poetic honesty shines through as each song appeared as if it was a page from his diary. His 2006 album The Rise And Fall Of Butch Walker And The Let’s Go Out Tonites was a brave glam-rock departure/throwback and one I admired, but have found to not to be as compelling as Letters because I didn’t feel as if his soul was tortured. Talk about impractical expectations for an artist to live up to.
Artists are at their best when they bleed. When they feel pain, their superstar status dissipates and they become just like us. This is what makes albums like Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, Peter Gabriel’s Us and Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love such crucial masterpieces where larger than life stars let their guard down and allowed us into their tortured psyche. They say the truth sets you free. Artists are more believable and engaging when their rock star aura melts away. Beneath all of the glitz and glamour are humans who feel pain just like you and me. Walker’s life has been on a topsy-turvy ride in the last twelve months and the doubt, anguish and desperation he has experienced has been crafted into his most mature and enduring work to date, Sycamore Meadows. Titled after the street where his house resided before a fire destroyed it (and everything he owned) last November, it’s a somber, philosophical and ultimately invigorating record. One track may be moody and melancholy and right around the corner is thunderous and primal redemption. It’s almost as if Walker decided to write his autobiography and set it to music. Full of illuminating and discerning layers, each listen of Sycamore Meadows is more gratifying and revealing. Sycamore Meadows is a dreamy and raw vista full of insurrectionary rage finding a fine balance between innocence and experience.
If “American Girl” is the greatest song Roger McGuinn never wrote, then Sycamore Meadows lead-off track “The Weight of Her” is the best damn song Tom Petty never wrote with a high octane chorus that will elicit sheer aural bliss about “the truth about girls” according to Walker. The last song written for the record gushes with soulful pop-sonics and surprisingly is unlike the rest of the album. In fact, Walker has created a wholly unique twelve-track opus where no two songs are alike. Shifting between boisterous rockers and more solemn weighty numbers, Walker’s production is flawless. He spent more time crafting this record than any other of his career and it shows. This is a record that very easily could have been over-produced, but ultimately Walker restrained many of the arrangements allowing the songs to breathe and ultimately make them illuminating. “Going Back/Going Home” was written at the urging of his manager in the wake of the fire and it may be the best thing Walker has ever written. The discreet life-affirming reflective song where he offers up insight into his entire life and career but at the end it becomes apparent that he indeed is in tune with himself and where he needs to go. It’s true, you have to go home and acknowledge your past in order to go on with the future. “Here Comes the...” is a power-pop ballad but instead of being drenched in over-production, the track is quite organic with minimal instrumentation and a heartfelt backing vocal by P!nk. If any A&R men are left at the major labels, they would have an up and coming artist cover this one as an entire career could be made on it. “Ships in a Bottle” was written in the weeks in the aftermath of the fire, but the luster of the lyrics is that while they are visceral, they are obsolete enough to allow the listener to paint their own picture of survival. One of the elements of Sycamore Meadows that radiates is the sense of loss, longing and the yearning to move on. Ultimately, one can wallow in their own sorrow, but how does one get from Good Friday to Easter Sunday?
“Vessels” is about the dissolution of a relationship features jaded verses with a furious chorus laced with the ever ringing catchiness of Walker’s best work while “Passed Your Place, Saw Your Car, Thought of You” has a desperate atmosphere surrounding it but the lyrics anchor the emotion. Once again, Walker decided to let the lyrics breathe amidst minimal instrumentation and they lacerate with a primacy missing from records these days. The last record to be this intimate and philosophical was Will Hoge’s 2007 opus Draw the Curtains which wound up being my top disc of that year. Despite the internal need to expunge, Sycamore Meadows has a number of musically muscular and ferocious anthems including “The 3 Kids in Brooklyn” which features an intoxicating “la-la” chorus that is pure Walker. It is ready-made for radio and shocks you back to life like a defibrillator after you have flat lined. There’s a biting and unrelenting truthfulness to the lyrics on the whole record as Walker is a no-nonsense rocker exposing the contradictions of labeling and society as a whole. “A Song for the Metalheads” is a folk tune that very easily could have been transformed into an arms-to-the-air anthem for the masses but one listen and you’ll know it’s exactly as it should be. “Closer to the Truth and Farther from the Sky” was written to be a tear down the walls anthem along the lines of “Born To Run”, but at the last minute, Walker removed the drums from the track and in some ways, it is refreshing as it allows the lyrics to shine through. When I spoke to Walker last summer about the record the one word he told me that would sum up the record was “introspective” and this is never truer than on “ATL” which has a bedroom intensity and intimacy not heard on record since Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. For an artist who has made a career of creating rich melodic records made for radio, Walker finds the perfect fit for each of these tracks never overreaching and never under delivering; Walker always finds the perfect medium that showcases the song in the best light possible.
We need artists to bleed artistically for us to find a centered life, because it reminds us that even their lives are not perfect. What makes Butch Walker so refreshing is his willingness to not sugar coat any of it. The brutal truth is here for everyone to dissect and indulge in. As the world crumbles around us we need the affirmation of these artists to be blunt and tell us the world is one messed up place, bad things happen to good people, but ultimately we must prevail. Sycamore Meadows features an artist at a crossroads with his foot on the gas pedal full speed ahead towards redemption with a unified and assertive collection of songs. However, while the speed normally causes most artists to lose sight of who they are and where they came from, Butch Walker has a close insightful eye on the rear view mirror completely aware that the past is never far behind. Unlike most artists who either forget or wallow in their past for their entire existence, Walker has found a powerful middle ground where he embraces the past so when he see’s it sneak up in that mirror, he can smile while simultaneously rolling down the windows and cranking the radio to ten in anticipation of that next great life journey.
Anthony Kuzminski is a Chicago based writer and Special Features Editor for the antiMusic Network and his daily writings can be read at The Screen Door and can be contacted at thescreendoor AT gmail DOT com.
