The Jayhawks – Imperfections in the American Dream?
While Uncle Tupelo were developing a rough, fast and aggressive form of country music, not so far away the Jayhawks were playing their own crucial part in the history of modern country music.
In creating their satisfying, organic blend of country and rock, the Jayhawks contributed to alternative country music the one thing which Uncle Tupelo, in their first couple of albums at least, couldn’t quite master: a fresh and natural sense of melody. The Jayhawks’ music sounds easy – not ‘easy listening’, like those soft-focus releases buried away in a dark corner of your local record store, but songs and ideas which sound like they were easy to conceive and execute. Whether it really was that straightforward doesn’t matter. The point is that the Jayhawks don’t sound strained, forced or desperate – they sound like they were born doing what they do. Without the earthy grit of Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks backed up their tunes with a personal and honest sound, rooted in the country. Between them, the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo ensured the passage of original, well written, country music into the 1990s and beyond.
It is probably fair to say that the Jayhawks started slowly. After their self-titled debut album in 1986, it was the 1989 release Blue Earth, actually no more than a collection of demos, which attracted the band’s first significant critical attention. Considering the decade of its release, the sound of Blue Earth is incongruous to the point of being unbelievable, because it really is a pure country album, verging at times on rockabilly. And although with its harmonies and laid-back feel it contains suggestions of what was to come, the record sounds like a developmental one – especially when you realise that its best songs, Two Angels and Martin’s Song, were both recycled and improved on their next album. Blue Earth contains little to suggest that the Jayhawks would be a major influence on thoughtful American music over the next decade or so.
But although not the Jayhawks’ first album, Hollywood Town Hall (1992), with its fresh and vital sound, now sounds like a debut album – a true original. And retrospectively, the influence this record had on the band’s later work, not to mention a whole host of other alternative country acts, also gives Hollywood Town Hall the feel of a debut. The lyrics and singing are crucial to this record – considered and flowing sentiments sung in a soulful manner. But the voices never seem separate from the band, fitting easily into its loosely hung country-blues feel – electric and acoustic guitars, piano and harmonica swinging happily on top of the bass and drums, leading and suggesting the songs’ melodies without ever seeking to dominate the singers. And what singers! Marc Olson and Gary Louris sing together constantly, and although most songs are primarily a ‘Marc song’ or a ‘Gary song’, it takes a trained ear to tell them apart. In a sense, the harmoniser, whose song it isn’t, is more noticeable than the singer, because both men have an incredible ability to pick out the best sounding harmony lines – sometimes sung strictly along with the lead vocalist, a third or a sixth above or below the melody, but at other times, veering off in, if not quite a separate direction, then only broadly the same direction, with an independent mind of his own. And actually what could be more appropriate – the theme of this album is in some vague place in the middle of wistful love, wilful individualism, and a self-evident care for others; all set in a windy wilderness. So really, you couldn’t have harmonies any other way than this unattached, free-thinking vocal style.
Hollywood Town Hall consists of ten good songs, but actually its first three songs between them sum up the mood and intention of the whole album. Waiting for the Sun, the opening track, immediately introduces that swinging guitar and piano vibe, and over the top of that Louris begins to reminisce in high-pitched tones:
I was waiting for the sun
Then I walked on home alone
What I didn't know
Was he was waiting for you to fall
There is a sparse quality to the lyrics, as the story of the narrator, the person he sings to, and some mysterious third person is only really half-told. But a knowing sense of confusion comes across, as does a restless drive to move on, away from troubles. This is an interesting song, sounding like it has a quintessentially Americana setting, but not really giving enough away to tell us exactly where. (This coupling of a strong sense of place with a complete absence of clues as to its location is a common feature of Jayhawks songs – but wherever they are, they generally seem to like it – as they sing in Two Angels, “This lifetime's easy / Way back home there's a funeral”.)
The music also adds to this strange feeling, with chord changes emphasised by firm and united syncopated strikes, and melodic instrumental lines which ascend and descend into the song’s refrains. This is one important way in which Waiting for the Sun is representative of much of the Jayhawks’ work. They fill their songs with an intriguing blend of spiky and smooth guitar playing. Gary Louris is no mere gunslinger; he is an inheritor of the songwriter-guitarist tradition of the likes of Robbie Robertson and Neil Young. His playing is thoughtful, full of awareness that less can often be more. But when he wants to break free from such self-imposed shackles, he does so with ease, producing in the listener less of a sense of surprise, of inappropriateness, than is the case with various other alt-country musicians. The results are constant variety and originality.
Next up on Hollywood Town Hall is Crowded in the Wings – a song with a less obvious musical pattern and more of a lyrical tale to tell. It has been said that country is white man’s soul music, but it may be more accurate to say that country, good country music, could and should be soul music. This number is. It is ostensibly a typical story of lost love, with the usual stuff about how life is rough and unreal since you’re gone; but there is a lot more to this song than that. The invocation once more of some mysterious third person, whose role is never explained, provides a natural progression from the album’s first song, and as the story progress, there is more and more real poetry in the telling:
You brought me to, the mother of mountains
You brought me to
And no one reads to you at night
And all your lies came to pass
Just something I said
Made you turn your life in
Been crowded in the wings
Mostly I don’t mind
Been crowded in the wings
Then it’s you I find
The song’s soulfully personal lyrics are backed by a carefree musical style, but the Jayhawks’ sound is definitely not as loose as that of many of their contemporaries. Right from the song’s introductory notes, and actually in many other songs on Hollywood Town Hall, there is a measured, regal quality to their music: although they sound completely organic and natural, they clearly impose some degree of self-restraint, so that they get the best – rather than the most – out of their instruments. Does this result in the lyrical impression of lines left unsaid, feelings left unexpressed? Not really. The point is, the instrumentation of the band has to be used to support appropriately the band’s message – not to swamp it. The song reigns supreme.
Having said this, it would be wrong to deny the existence of ambivalence in the Jayhawks’ music. The person whom the narrator of Crowded in the Wings is singing to seems to have saved him; but not from some terrible fate. For the majority of the time, “mostly”, he doesn’t mind his lot in life – simply, it is okay. You get by on your own, as an individual with your own place within American society, within the American dream – his place is “in the wings”, and from the sounds of things he is not the only one. Sometimes, just sometimes, the American dream’s limitations are unavoidable – you need something more than that individualistic, get by on your own, life philosophy. That’s when people, and relationships, like those in the Jayhawks songs come into their own.
So we begin to see that the Jayhawks, for the most, accept the American dream, but they’re not afraid to expose its flaws. The collectivist, compassionate beliefs epitomised in the next song, Clouds, are the final piece in the jigsaw, as they represent the final thing needed to justify the Jayhawks as a complete American band: the spirit. The individualistic side of their philosophy is self-evident throughout their work, but in order to represent the coming together, the drawing together, of their country through music, the band needed songs like this:
God of the rich man ain't the God for the poor
Autumn ending, the state hospital’s closed
Then wouldn't you know
Winos and office girls in the park
Wanted you alone to walk beside her
Wanted you alone to live beside her
It was mornin’
Better roads with light on them
Can your diamonds talk to you
Can you see them shine
Keep them hiding in your room
Can they guide you in your time
Most of the songs on Hollywood Town Hall imply a rejection of the importance of the material – it is all about the relationship, the journey. But Clouds collectivises that sentiment. This is a song about going beyond the materialistic: it takes the need – occasional and transient though it may be – for comfort and solace, expressed in Crowded in the Wings, to its logical conclusion – collectivism. And by doing so from the perspective of a one-on-one relationship as usual, it ensures that it works as a song.
So the first three tracks on Hollywood Town Hall set the scene for the album – but in fact they do more than that, as they set out the Jayhawks’ stall as a band with something new and original to say about that most hackneyed and clichéd of subjects, the American dream. Between them, those songs lay down a musical marker, setting a standard which would remain as a constant for the rest of the album, and for entire careers of other bands, but which would be abandoned by this band as soon as the album was completed. That loose and yet restrained style, full of swings and swirls, melodies and melancholia, is at once distinctive and perfectly suited to the songs Olson and Louris had written, the messages they wanted to get across.
The rest of the album is used to explore these messages, these themes, and in the process of doing so some really good songs are produced, most of which continue the examination – often indirect and fleeting, but present nonetheless – of the imperfections in the American dream. Sister Cry, for example, features interesting and ambiguous lyrics over a conventional song structure (again, the music must never get in the way of the song). The lyrics pose more questions than they answer – what has happened to the person being sung to, the “sister” of the song’s title? And does the narrator think there is much hope for her? None of this is terribly clear. There are hints of encouraging words for the future: “Sister cry, been mistreated / Doesn't mean someone won't let you in”; and, more significantly, “Could be up ahead you'll be seeing changes”. Well that sounds positive enough, but unfortunately “Somehow the changes made won't belong to you”. It is almost as if he is saying, whatever has happened, and whatever changes for the better in the future, it’ll all be a bit separate from you. So there could be more of the same in store for sister?
In a similar vein, Nevada, California is an even darker song. The protagonist yearns for something from times gone by, but nothing as innocent as childhood. This song deals in fragmented, fleeting images, rather than completed pictures, but what we do hear gives us some clues – kicked around on the bum, your lovesick cousin, and the possibility of jewels behind the lies. In fact, the whole seems to be greater than the sum of its parts, because the resulting image, however imprecise, is strong and powerful. Even the guitar solo goes practically unnoticed, because the song is all about the swinging backing to a guilty memorial of some sort. The key word in the chorus isn’t even clear – what was the last thing he tried to do – hold her, or haunt her? The answer is the former, but even if this blurriness is not deliberate, its effect is unsettling; the image is not a rosy one. Has he done wrong, or does he just feel wrong?
Again, the existence of these questions has broad implications for the Jayhawks’ view of America. As ever in popular music’s meaningful but frustratingly imprecise philosophy, these are difficult to answer, and in any case to attempt to so this soon would be inappropriate. Besides, in music there is often a flip side. Hollywood Town Hall’s flip side is Martin’s Song, the closing track, and it works as a song if not as a convincing riposte to what has come before. This is a re-make of the song that first appeared on Blue Earth, and it is a song of hope. The guitar and organ swirl around as the narrator talks about killers and city developments – in essence he tells us how bad it all is. But, he says, it is going to be okay. Returning to a common Jayhawks device, while the verse gives us the big picture, the societal deficiencies, the chorus personalises both the problem and the solution.
I've been working all night
I go long into the day
Ain't got much money now
Got the time ahead
Got the time ahead to pay
The song works if the listener takes the chorus’ upbeat message and applies it to the problems outlined in the verse. To an extent, they pull it off. The solutions in the “time ahead” can be found both in the middle distance – the collectivism and comfort from a friend sung of in earlier songs on the album – and in the immediate path – that is, in time itself.
In terms of its sound, Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995) could perhaps be described as the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album. The album maintains the swinging quality present on Hollywood Town Hall, but it is certainly less bluesy, leaning away from the electric guitar, and relying increasingly on a really acoustic base from which to build. And in terms of the album’s themes, it seems to address less the philosophical aspects of the American dream, and more the geographical ones. While the settings for the songs are, as ever, imprecise, their descriptions and occurrences become increasingly frequent and vivid, giving listeners the feeling that they are on the verge of a complete and satisfactory picture of the album’s physical location. Unfortunately, the album doesn’t quite deliver.
In fact the similarities between Tomorrow the Green Grass and its predecessor are not simply confined to some vague, barely specified musically expressed social philosophy. Because the inexorable, rolling musical feel of Hollywood Town Hall is still present on Tomorrow the Green Grass. No-one would ever doubt that these were two albums from the same – or at least a similar – model, and the word ‘model’, with the image of a car that it invokes, is the right one, because this album is always on the move, travelling across that same half-told country, led as ever by two guys singing in harmony.
Not surprisingly, the Jayhawks begin their search on Tomorrow the Green Grass from a place of caution, a feeling of safety first. Two Hearts is a gorgeous song, performed with an even heavier dose of measured restraint than usual. Every soft strum of the acoustic guitar is damped, and the guitar solo in the middle is a reluctant acknowledgement of the need for something like that in the middle of the song – it is cut short, clipped, and played on a quiet baritone guitar. Once more the Jayhawks seem determined to fit the music to the song’s point, and in this particular song they sum up easily and succinctly the limitations of their lives and the lives of everyone around them:
Well I know your name
Takes you back from where you came
Your words, they shone
Sometimes it's real to be alone
So real to be alone
It isn’t sad to be alone, or terrible to be alone; it is just real to be alone. This is not a common type of thing for songwriters to say – this is how it is. We are more used to musicians dealing in extremes of emotion and situation – love, death, the earth moving, the town burning. The Jayhawks give their songwriting more thought and come up with something much easier to identify with, and all the more remarkable for that. It isn’t great, but this is how it sometimes is.
But this is not to say that they’re not searching for something better. In fact, Tomorrow the Green Grass isn’t only the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album because of its sound; it is also the album where they seem to be travelling. This is nothing new to music, of course, but in the context of the alt-country boom, the likes of Whiskeytown, Jim White and others didn’t get their physically shifting influences from the industrially rooted anger of Uncle Tupelo; it came from the restless and uneasy searches carried out by the Jayhawks. And searching they were: Tomorrow the Green Grass contains a real sense of purpose. The opening track, Blue, contains a genuine excitement about the emotional heights that the band may be about to arrive at. I’d Run Away, the album’s second song, has a real sense of impatience, with the band running and skipping towards some kind of resolution. And once again, the band’s sound fits the words like a glove, because the point of this song is that, as ever, the narrator’s lot in life is satisfactory, but not quite as spectacular as he once envisaged:
So we had a little baby boy
But we knew it wouldn't last too long
Kind of what I had in mind
But what I had in mind was strong
While the words tell the tale of the realities of the present and the dreams of the past, the band expresses what is only implied by the lyrics: the search for something more. Is this something the fulfilment of the American dream? Or something that the American dream cannot quite deliver? The answer is surely the latter, because the confident individualism, the do-it-yourself and do-it-for-yourself attitude required by the American dream, is shown in the song Miss Williams’ Guitar to be inadequate. It is in this song that Mark Olson achieves that thing in his mind that was “strong” – that romantic collectivism which was what he needed – his missing link. And for once this is not merely implied or suggested, because the story in the song is real and true. Miss Williams’ Guitar unashamedly tells the story of the meeting of minds and lives between Olson and the singer-songwriter Victoria Williams. Olson didn’t need an army of lovers, supporters and associates – he just needed one true companion. As Olson watches Williams, “The whole damn crowd” – all those isolated individuals engaged in their own independent searches for something similar – seem “so far away”. Gary Louris’ contribution to the song is surely to agree with Olson’s assessment of the situation, as his Byrds-style guitar accompaniment gives way to a soaring, euphoric solo, paying tribute to and playing with the song’s melody, serving as a valediction and a confirmation. And, as it turned out, a farewell (if not quite a eulogy). Because with the completion of Tomorrow the Green Grass came the departure of Mark Olson from the Jayhawks. The band’s songwriting duo was split in two, and, in a sense, so was their purpose as alt-country trailblazers. This division wasn’t sudden – many of the later songs on the album sound rather less meaningful – and in fact are just not as good as – the first few tracks, or the collection on Hollywood Town Hall. But while Olson took the band’s purer country side with him and set up the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers with Williams, Louris began to take the Jayhawks in new sonic directions – more interesting, for sure, and possibly more visionary too. But indisputably, the remaining Jayhawks retained something of that intangible American spirit, and the continuing tension between individual self-reliance and the need for group comfort became ever more prominent.
From the opening chords of Sound of Lies (1997), struck darkly and ominously by an echo-drenched piano, the album’s intentions are clear. The ultimate message of the band’s earlier music, which is unambiguous if somewhat measured, is that hope, and maybe redemption, can usually be found, even if you have to look beyond your normal realm of life in order to find them. In Sound of Lies, only the initial assumption, the underlying premise, remains: things often go bad. Listening to this album, it doesn’t seem so much like there is a way out, a way up.
Sound of Lies is a wonderful record – innovative and fresh, combining genuine and old-fashioned rock and roll songwriting talent, with modern elements like distortion, a fuzz guitar even more prominent that on their earlier albums, and strong keyboard orientation. That opening piano is significant musically, because in the past the piano had been an accompanying instrument for the Jayhawks – contributing to the loose and sometimes bluesy bounce that they created. Now, it is a lead instrument, using its darker side to shape songs. Once it has set the scene for The Man Who Loved Life, with which the album spectacularly opens, there is only one way for Gary Louris to sing. His harmonies with Mark Olson always sounded very natural and easy, but let’s be honest, the very fact of harmonising is a constraint. Now, on his own, his voice becomes more expressive, giving fuller rein to the emotions which caused the song to be written. The band remains a superb harmonising band, but on Sound of Lies most of the harmonies are more structured, and, more importantly, subservient to the lead vocalist. Notwithstanding the fact that a small number of its songs were written (or co-written) by other members of the band, Sound of Lies is very much Louris’ creation, and he is in no mood to talk about the search for something better. If anything, the protagonist in The Man Who Loved Life is on a downward spiral:
Won't you take my hand
Won't you be my friend
Take my advice, go away
When the days get short and the chips are down
Will you be there will you stick around
There is no question mark at the end of that verse, because there really is no question other than a rhetorical one. Louris’ advice is simple: things are bad - go away. And he doesn’t mean to say, leave this place behind, go and find the answer, your answer. It is more “leave me alone”. The song switches confusingly between characters, but the lasting impression of the song is the jarring counterpoint of a shift to a major key, backed by what would normally be cheery repetitions of “oooh….la-la-la”, with the awful half-vision of a man who loved – past tense – life. He is still alive, he is an “is” rather than a “was”, but his love for life is referred to only in the past tense. There is little hope in these bleak lines.
The other key song on Sound of Lies is Haywire. Musically, this song combines that old clipped Jayhawks with their newer desire to innovate – typified by the boxed-up guitar sound, clipped and distorted, but with a classic rhythm; all underpinned by a confident bass from Marc Perlman, one of the band’s two ever-presents. And above that, Louris sings his story with heart-rending emotion. While this album has a broader and more innovative reach of sound than its predecessors, its realm and domain are much smaller and closer. It is strange, then, that while their earlier songs contained strong and vivid references to America’s landscape and heartlands, they never really named particular places; while Haywire, one of their most personal songs, name-checks particular places and, in terms, of the words on paper, gives a clear idea of where the song is set. But while before the unnamed and elliptically referred to places were of crucial importance, now, the locations, although specified, are of no consequence. There is an echo of songs gone by, as Louris suggests a phlegmatic view of the terrible life (that has gone “haywire”) he has suffered:
That's my whole life in a nutshell
Take it as you will
I can hear that old brass band
Playing our song down the hill
But this is a story of lost love, without much hope for the future. The song reaches a glorious zenith, and embarks upon a slow fade, with Louris and the band’s other singers criss-crossing imaginatively as they implore the person at whom he is singing to “smile, smile, smile”; but this doesn’t seem to be any reference to things “getting better”. His chances of a good life appear to have disappeared, and all that is left is to offer some simple advice to someone who – it seems – is in the driving seat in any case.
However, for all of the glum assessments and predictions found on Sound of Lies, Haywire did perhaps suggest something to the band – if not the listener- about the way forward. Smile. Because while their next record (released in 2000) is one of their weakest, leaning far too far towards a synthesiser-based sound, the lyrics of its key songs suggest a band once more beginning to reach upwards. The album’s title? Smile, of course.
Sound of Lies must really be seen as a reaction. The Jayhawks had made a bluesy album and then a nicely organic acoustic/electric album, both of which tried to make some sort of sense of America, through the eyes and ears of individuals and relationships. Gary Louris, having been freed of the folk music orientations of Mark Olson, retreated away from the philosophical big picture, which had perhaps squashed the chances for musical experimentation. With Sound of Lies, he let the music take charge, fitting emotional and personal tales around a dramatic and pleasing soundscape. But by the time the band wrote the songs for Smile, it seems that they wanted to reach up again, to a more positive message and themes. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, for instance, starts with fairly typical implied suggestions of two troubled lives inside a problematic world. But where there is no love, let us not lament – let us strain for it, let us create it, let us hold onto it:
I'm gonna make you love me
I'm gonna dry your tears
And we're gonna stay together
For a million years
The lyrics themselves are nothing special; but what they are saying is a notable shift in gear from the Jayhawks. And as they began to make that change, back to a more positive mindset, the music changed too. In 2003 they released Rainy Day Music, probably one of their most complete records, and it seems that as they made it, they remembered that the early Jayhawks didn’t just use that natural blend of electric and acoustic, of country music with bluesy sensibilities, of great personal songwriting with a good awareness of the world around; they created it. It was time to use it once more.
Rainy Day Music is not the Jayhawks’ deepest album, nor their most memorable, nor their most original. But it is their most melodic, and possibly their least flawed. Lyrically, it clearly contains mixed messages. There are pretty love songs, with plenty of ‘It’ll be alright’ sentiments; there are some songs which lean towards the darker extreme of the band’s songwriting scope; and there are others which return the band to their capacity to offer a glimmer – and often no more than that – of hope to the benighted. Over and above all else, this is a collection of individually well-crafted songs, and in terms of what it addresses, it doesn’t quite reach the big picture of the Jayhawks’ first few albums. But in a sense, they have come full circle, because that is their point about the American dream – it is intangible at best, and severely flawed at worst. If everyone is as individualistic – and as different – as the American dream assumes, then surely by the same token the answers are different for everyone as well. The big heading, the big solution, the American way, might not suit all.
The Jayhawks brought in Ethan Johns to produce Rainy Day Music, and in doing so, again, they showed a willingness to return to the alt-country scene they had helped create. Johns has produced a wide variety of artists, but most significantly in this context, he produced Ryan Adams’ first two solo albums. In moving from the poster-boy of alt-country to some of the founders of the movement, Johns brought with him his own particular take on the acoustic-electric blend: incredibly clear-sounding acoustic guitars, jingle-jangle electric guitar and slide playing off each other in an explicitly country manner, frequent bursts of harmonica, a bass which leads the song’s rhythm, and, most importantly given the Jayhawks’ history, a harmonic style which is more unplanned, off-the-cuff, and egalitarian.
Similarly, Rainy Day Music’s lyrics are mainly about options and solutions. Sure, there are problems in the world, in the lives of the songs’ protagonists. Rock music would be lost without such difficulties. But however vague the Jayhawks’ remedies and palliatives are, they are there, and this fact lends an air of reassurance and comfort to proceedings. In Save it for a Rainy Day, the guitars shimmer all over the song so that from the outset, you know that the sad life being described is going to collapse into something more positive:
Looking like a train wreck
Wearing too much makeup
The burden that you carry
Is more than one soul could ever bear
Don't look so sad, Marina
There's another part to play
Don't look so sad, Marina
Save it for a rainy day
This kind of sentiment recurs throughout the album, as Louris and Tim O’Reagan – a fine songwriter in his own right – exort the listener to take my love and make it last, and to make your mistakes and go on your way. Don’t look back. Even on the album’s darker moments, in songs like the inexorable Tailspin and the awkward and uncomfortable You Look So Young, this is a romantic album, with love and relationships as both cause and cure. There is a tension there which is never quite resolved, and it adds drama to what are already fine, melodic pieces of work.
Ultimately, however, we’re left in doubt that the over-arching dichotomy in the Jayhawks’ work, between the individualistic, independent American and the need for solace and reliance on others, can be satisfactorily closed. In Angelyne, amidst impeccably gelled harmonies and using a magnificently soaring melody, Louris brings home that old truth – that most of the time, most of the time, people get by on their own, if only because they have to:
Angelyne, forgive me
We threw it all away
I could never fit into your plans
I'm nobody's man
But that is only half the story. In a rare songwriting credit for bassist Marc Perlman, the band use the death of a close friend to give voice to that lingering feeling of regret that people often feel, for feelings not expressed, for dreams not fulfilled, before it is too late. But in the end there is hope, real belief in the value to human nature of that collectivist fall-back:
Will I see you in heaven
Shine your light from above
With your love I am never alone
Won't you carry me, won't you carry me home
And although the Jayhawks may well make more music further down the line, that seems to be as good an end-point as any. Compared directly with the Jayhawks’ first three albums, culminating with the groundbreaking Hollywood Town Hall, Rainy Day Music is substantially different: more ordered, more melodic, less bluesy. But given everything that occurred in between, all the miles of music the band travelled along, their most recent record is in many ways a nostalgic one. Taking the core elements of the genre – great songs, a small ensemble with emphasis placed with thought, and a real – if unspecific – location at America’s heart, the Jayhawks returned to the place they held at the peak of the alt-country scene. And in doing so, they completed their examination of the American dream, in which they relate real and imagined experiences to a world-view which goes far beyond such a bland and inadequate cliché. By really thinking, questioning what the limits and possibilities of that American dream really are, and by making fine music based on the sounds of the American country, the Jayhawks prove that they truly are an American band, in the best sense.
In creating their satisfying, organic blend of country and rock, the Jayhawks contributed to alternative country music the one thing which Uncle Tupelo, in their first couple of albums at least, couldn’t quite master: a fresh and natural sense of melody. The Jayhawks’ music sounds easy – not ‘easy listening’, like those soft-focus releases buried away in a dark corner of your local record store, but songs and ideas which sound like they were easy to conceive and execute. Whether it really was that straightforward doesn’t matter. The point is that the Jayhawks don’t sound strained, forced or desperate – they sound like they were born doing what they do. Without the earthy grit of Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks backed up their tunes with a personal and honest sound, rooted in the country. Between them, the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo ensured the passage of original, well written, country music into the 1990s and beyond.
It is probably fair to say that the Jayhawks started slowly. After their self-titled debut album in 1986, it was the 1989 release Blue Earth, actually no more than a collection of demos, which attracted the band’s first significant critical attention. Considering the decade of its release, the sound of Blue Earth is incongruous to the point of being unbelievable, because it really is a pure country album, verging at times on rockabilly. And although with its harmonies and laid-back feel it contains suggestions of what was to come, the record sounds like a developmental one – especially when you realise that its best songs, Two Angels and Martin’s Song, were both recycled and improved on their next album. Blue Earth contains little to suggest that the Jayhawks would be a major influence on thoughtful American music over the next decade or so.
But although not the Jayhawks’ first album, Hollywood Town Hall (1992), with its fresh and vital sound, now sounds like a debut album – a true original. And retrospectively, the influence this record had on the band’s later work, not to mention a whole host of other alternative country acts, also gives Hollywood Town Hall the feel of a debut. The lyrics and singing are crucial to this record – considered and flowing sentiments sung in a soulful manner. But the voices never seem separate from the band, fitting easily into its loosely hung country-blues feel – electric and acoustic guitars, piano and harmonica swinging happily on top of the bass and drums, leading and suggesting the songs’ melodies without ever seeking to dominate the singers. And what singers! Marc Olson and Gary Louris sing together constantly, and although most songs are primarily a ‘Marc song’ or a ‘Gary song’, it takes a trained ear to tell them apart. In a sense, the harmoniser, whose song it isn’t, is more noticeable than the singer, because both men have an incredible ability to pick out the best sounding harmony lines – sometimes sung strictly along with the lead vocalist, a third or a sixth above or below the melody, but at other times, veering off in, if not quite a separate direction, then only broadly the same direction, with an independent mind of his own. And actually what could be more appropriate – the theme of this album is in some vague place in the middle of wistful love, wilful individualism, and a self-evident care for others; all set in a windy wilderness. So really, you couldn’t have harmonies any other way than this unattached, free-thinking vocal style.
Hollywood Town Hall consists of ten good songs, but actually its first three songs between them sum up the mood and intention of the whole album. Waiting for the Sun, the opening track, immediately introduces that swinging guitar and piano vibe, and over the top of that Louris begins to reminisce in high-pitched tones:
I was waiting for the sun
Then I walked on home alone
What I didn't know
Was he was waiting for you to fall
There is a sparse quality to the lyrics, as the story of the narrator, the person he sings to, and some mysterious third person is only really half-told. But a knowing sense of confusion comes across, as does a restless drive to move on, away from troubles. This is an interesting song, sounding like it has a quintessentially Americana setting, but not really giving enough away to tell us exactly where. (This coupling of a strong sense of place with a complete absence of clues as to its location is a common feature of Jayhawks songs – but wherever they are, they generally seem to like it – as they sing in Two Angels, “This lifetime's easy / Way back home there's a funeral”.)
The music also adds to this strange feeling, with chord changes emphasised by firm and united syncopated strikes, and melodic instrumental lines which ascend and descend into the song’s refrains. This is one important way in which Waiting for the Sun is representative of much of the Jayhawks’ work. They fill their songs with an intriguing blend of spiky and smooth guitar playing. Gary Louris is no mere gunslinger; he is an inheritor of the songwriter-guitarist tradition of the likes of Robbie Robertson and Neil Young. His playing is thoughtful, full of awareness that less can often be more. But when he wants to break free from such self-imposed shackles, he does so with ease, producing in the listener less of a sense of surprise, of inappropriateness, than is the case with various other alt-country musicians. The results are constant variety and originality.
Next up on Hollywood Town Hall is Crowded in the Wings – a song with a less obvious musical pattern and more of a lyrical tale to tell. It has been said that country is white man’s soul music, but it may be more accurate to say that country, good country music, could and should be soul music. This number is. It is ostensibly a typical story of lost love, with the usual stuff about how life is rough and unreal since you’re gone; but there is a lot more to this song than that. The invocation once more of some mysterious third person, whose role is never explained, provides a natural progression from the album’s first song, and as the story progress, there is more and more real poetry in the telling:
You brought me to, the mother of mountains
You brought me to
And no one reads to you at night
And all your lies came to pass
Just something I said
Made you turn your life in
Been crowded in the wings
Mostly I don’t mind
Been crowded in the wings
Then it’s you I find
The song’s soulfully personal lyrics are backed by a carefree musical style, but the Jayhawks’ sound is definitely not as loose as that of many of their contemporaries. Right from the song’s introductory notes, and actually in many other songs on Hollywood Town Hall, there is a measured, regal quality to their music: although they sound completely organic and natural, they clearly impose some degree of self-restraint, so that they get the best – rather than the most – out of their instruments. Does this result in the lyrical impression of lines left unsaid, feelings left unexpressed? Not really. The point is, the instrumentation of the band has to be used to support appropriately the band’s message – not to swamp it. The song reigns supreme.
Having said this, it would be wrong to deny the existence of ambivalence in the Jayhawks’ music. The person whom the narrator of Crowded in the Wings is singing to seems to have saved him; but not from some terrible fate. For the majority of the time, “mostly”, he doesn’t mind his lot in life – simply, it is okay. You get by on your own, as an individual with your own place within American society, within the American dream – his place is “in the wings”, and from the sounds of things he is not the only one. Sometimes, just sometimes, the American dream’s limitations are unavoidable – you need something more than that individualistic, get by on your own, life philosophy. That’s when people, and relationships, like those in the Jayhawks songs come into their own.
So we begin to see that the Jayhawks, for the most, accept the American dream, but they’re not afraid to expose its flaws. The collectivist, compassionate beliefs epitomised in the next song, Clouds, are the final piece in the jigsaw, as they represent the final thing needed to justify the Jayhawks as a complete American band: the spirit. The individualistic side of their philosophy is self-evident throughout their work, but in order to represent the coming together, the drawing together, of their country through music, the band needed songs like this:
God of the rich man ain't the God for the poor
Autumn ending, the state hospital’s closed
Then wouldn't you know
Winos and office girls in the park
Wanted you alone to walk beside her
Wanted you alone to live beside her
It was mornin’
Better roads with light on them
Can your diamonds talk to you
Can you see them shine
Keep them hiding in your room
Can they guide you in your time
Most of the songs on Hollywood Town Hall imply a rejection of the importance of the material – it is all about the relationship, the journey. But Clouds collectivises that sentiment. This is a song about going beyond the materialistic: it takes the need – occasional and transient though it may be – for comfort and solace, expressed in Crowded in the Wings, to its logical conclusion – collectivism. And by doing so from the perspective of a one-on-one relationship as usual, it ensures that it works as a song.
So the first three tracks on Hollywood Town Hall set the scene for the album – but in fact they do more than that, as they set out the Jayhawks’ stall as a band with something new and original to say about that most hackneyed and clichéd of subjects, the American dream. Between them, those songs lay down a musical marker, setting a standard which would remain as a constant for the rest of the album, and for entire careers of other bands, but which would be abandoned by this band as soon as the album was completed. That loose and yet restrained style, full of swings and swirls, melodies and melancholia, is at once distinctive and perfectly suited to the songs Olson and Louris had written, the messages they wanted to get across.
The rest of the album is used to explore these messages, these themes, and in the process of doing so some really good songs are produced, most of which continue the examination – often indirect and fleeting, but present nonetheless – of the imperfections in the American dream. Sister Cry, for example, features interesting and ambiguous lyrics over a conventional song structure (again, the music must never get in the way of the song). The lyrics pose more questions than they answer – what has happened to the person being sung to, the “sister” of the song’s title? And does the narrator think there is much hope for her? None of this is terribly clear. There are hints of encouraging words for the future: “Sister cry, been mistreated / Doesn't mean someone won't let you in”; and, more significantly, “Could be up ahead you'll be seeing changes”. Well that sounds positive enough, but unfortunately “Somehow the changes made won't belong to you”. It is almost as if he is saying, whatever has happened, and whatever changes for the better in the future, it’ll all be a bit separate from you. So there could be more of the same in store for sister?
In a similar vein, Nevada, California is an even darker song. The protagonist yearns for something from times gone by, but nothing as innocent as childhood. This song deals in fragmented, fleeting images, rather than completed pictures, but what we do hear gives us some clues – kicked around on the bum, your lovesick cousin, and the possibility of jewels behind the lies. In fact, the whole seems to be greater than the sum of its parts, because the resulting image, however imprecise, is strong and powerful. Even the guitar solo goes practically unnoticed, because the song is all about the swinging backing to a guilty memorial of some sort. The key word in the chorus isn’t even clear – what was the last thing he tried to do – hold her, or haunt her? The answer is the former, but even if this blurriness is not deliberate, its effect is unsettling; the image is not a rosy one. Has he done wrong, or does he just feel wrong?
Again, the existence of these questions has broad implications for the Jayhawks’ view of America. As ever in popular music’s meaningful but frustratingly imprecise philosophy, these are difficult to answer, and in any case to attempt to so this soon would be inappropriate. Besides, in music there is often a flip side. Hollywood Town Hall’s flip side is Martin’s Song, the closing track, and it works as a song if not as a convincing riposte to what has come before. This is a re-make of the song that first appeared on Blue Earth, and it is a song of hope. The guitar and organ swirl around as the narrator talks about killers and city developments – in essence he tells us how bad it all is. But, he says, it is going to be okay. Returning to a common Jayhawks device, while the verse gives us the big picture, the societal deficiencies, the chorus personalises both the problem and the solution.
I've been working all night
I go long into the day
Ain't got much money now
Got the time ahead
Got the time ahead to pay
The song works if the listener takes the chorus’ upbeat message and applies it to the problems outlined in the verse. To an extent, they pull it off. The solutions in the “time ahead” can be found both in the middle distance – the collectivism and comfort from a friend sung of in earlier songs on the album – and in the immediate path – that is, in time itself.
In terms of its sound, Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995) could perhaps be described as the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album. The album maintains the swinging quality present on Hollywood Town Hall, but it is certainly less bluesy, leaning away from the electric guitar, and relying increasingly on a really acoustic base from which to build. And in terms of the album’s themes, it seems to address less the philosophical aspects of the American dream, and more the geographical ones. While the settings for the songs are, as ever, imprecise, their descriptions and occurrences become increasingly frequent and vivid, giving listeners the feeling that they are on the verge of a complete and satisfactory picture of the album’s physical location. Unfortunately, the album doesn’t quite deliver.
In fact the similarities between Tomorrow the Green Grass and its predecessor are not simply confined to some vague, barely specified musically expressed social philosophy. Because the inexorable, rolling musical feel of Hollywood Town Hall is still present on Tomorrow the Green Grass. No-one would ever doubt that these were two albums from the same – or at least a similar – model, and the word ‘model’, with the image of a car that it invokes, is the right one, because this album is always on the move, travelling across that same half-told country, led as ever by two guys singing in harmony.
Not surprisingly, the Jayhawks begin their search on Tomorrow the Green Grass from a place of caution, a feeling of safety first. Two Hearts is a gorgeous song, performed with an even heavier dose of measured restraint than usual. Every soft strum of the acoustic guitar is damped, and the guitar solo in the middle is a reluctant acknowledgement of the need for something like that in the middle of the song – it is cut short, clipped, and played on a quiet baritone guitar. Once more the Jayhawks seem determined to fit the music to the song’s point, and in this particular song they sum up easily and succinctly the limitations of their lives and the lives of everyone around them:
Well I know your name
Takes you back from where you came
Your words, they shone
Sometimes it's real to be alone
So real to be alone
It isn’t sad to be alone, or terrible to be alone; it is just real to be alone. This is not a common type of thing for songwriters to say – this is how it is. We are more used to musicians dealing in extremes of emotion and situation – love, death, the earth moving, the town burning. The Jayhawks give their songwriting more thought and come up with something much easier to identify with, and all the more remarkable for that. It isn’t great, but this is how it sometimes is.
But this is not to say that they’re not searching for something better. In fact, Tomorrow the Green Grass isn’t only the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album because of its sound; it is also the album where they seem to be travelling. This is nothing new to music, of course, but in the context of the alt-country boom, the likes of Whiskeytown, Jim White and others didn’t get their physically shifting influences from the industrially rooted anger of Uncle Tupelo; it came from the restless and uneasy searches carried out by the Jayhawks. And searching they were: Tomorrow the Green Grass contains a real sense of purpose. The opening track, Blue, contains a genuine excitement about the emotional heights that the band may be about to arrive at. I’d Run Away, the album’s second song, has a real sense of impatience, with the band running and skipping towards some kind of resolution. And once again, the band’s sound fits the words like a glove, because the point of this song is that, as ever, the narrator’s lot in life is satisfactory, but not quite as spectacular as he once envisaged:
So we had a little baby boy
But we knew it wouldn't last too long
Kind of what I had in mind
But what I had in mind was strong
While the words tell the tale of the realities of the present and the dreams of the past, the band expresses what is only implied by the lyrics: the search for something more. Is this something the fulfilment of the American dream? Or something that the American dream cannot quite deliver? The answer is surely the latter, because the confident individualism, the do-it-yourself and do-it-for-yourself attitude required by the American dream, is shown in the song Miss Williams’ Guitar to be inadequate. It is in this song that Mark Olson achieves that thing in his mind that was “strong” – that romantic collectivism which was what he needed – his missing link. And for once this is not merely implied or suggested, because the story in the song is real and true. Miss Williams’ Guitar unashamedly tells the story of the meeting of minds and lives between Olson and the singer-songwriter Victoria Williams. Olson didn’t need an army of lovers, supporters and associates – he just needed one true companion. As Olson watches Williams, “The whole damn crowd” – all those isolated individuals engaged in their own independent searches for something similar – seem “so far away”. Gary Louris’ contribution to the song is surely to agree with Olson’s assessment of the situation, as his Byrds-style guitar accompaniment gives way to a soaring, euphoric solo, paying tribute to and playing with the song’s melody, serving as a valediction and a confirmation. And, as it turned out, a farewell (if not quite a eulogy). Because with the completion of Tomorrow the Green Grass came the departure of Mark Olson from the Jayhawks. The band’s songwriting duo was split in two, and, in a sense, so was their purpose as alt-country trailblazers. This division wasn’t sudden – many of the later songs on the album sound rather less meaningful – and in fact are just not as good as – the first few tracks, or the collection on Hollywood Town Hall. But while Olson took the band’s purer country side with him and set up the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers with Williams, Louris began to take the Jayhawks in new sonic directions – more interesting, for sure, and possibly more visionary too. But indisputably, the remaining Jayhawks retained something of that intangible American spirit, and the continuing tension between individual self-reliance and the need for group comfort became ever more prominent.
From the opening chords of Sound of Lies (1997), struck darkly and ominously by an echo-drenched piano, the album’s intentions are clear. The ultimate message of the band’s earlier music, which is unambiguous if somewhat measured, is that hope, and maybe redemption, can usually be found, even if you have to look beyond your normal realm of life in order to find them. In Sound of Lies, only the initial assumption, the underlying premise, remains: things often go bad. Listening to this album, it doesn’t seem so much like there is a way out, a way up.
Sound of Lies is a wonderful record – innovative and fresh, combining genuine and old-fashioned rock and roll songwriting talent, with modern elements like distortion, a fuzz guitar even more prominent that on their earlier albums, and strong keyboard orientation. That opening piano is significant musically, because in the past the piano had been an accompanying instrument for the Jayhawks – contributing to the loose and sometimes bluesy bounce that they created. Now, it is a lead instrument, using its darker side to shape songs. Once it has set the scene for The Man Who Loved Life, with which the album spectacularly opens, there is only one way for Gary Louris to sing. His harmonies with Mark Olson always sounded very natural and easy, but let’s be honest, the very fact of harmonising is a constraint. Now, on his own, his voice becomes more expressive, giving fuller rein to the emotions which caused the song to be written. The band remains a superb harmonising band, but on Sound of Lies most of the harmonies are more structured, and, more importantly, subservient to the lead vocalist. Notwithstanding the fact that a small number of its songs were written (or co-written) by other members of the band, Sound of Lies is very much Louris’ creation, and he is in no mood to talk about the search for something better. If anything, the protagonist in The Man Who Loved Life is on a downward spiral:
Won't you take my hand
Won't you be my friend
Take my advice, go away
When the days get short and the chips are down
Will you be there will you stick around
There is no question mark at the end of that verse, because there really is no question other than a rhetorical one. Louris’ advice is simple: things are bad - go away. And he doesn’t mean to say, leave this place behind, go and find the answer, your answer. It is more “leave me alone”. The song switches confusingly between characters, but the lasting impression of the song is the jarring counterpoint of a shift to a major key, backed by what would normally be cheery repetitions of “oooh….la-la-la”, with the awful half-vision of a man who loved – past tense – life. He is still alive, he is an “is” rather than a “was”, but his love for life is referred to only in the past tense. There is little hope in these bleak lines.
The other key song on Sound of Lies is Haywire. Musically, this song combines that old clipped Jayhawks with their newer desire to innovate – typified by the boxed-up guitar sound, clipped and distorted, but with a classic rhythm; all underpinned by a confident bass from Marc Perlman, one of the band’s two ever-presents. And above that, Louris sings his story with heart-rending emotion. While this album has a broader and more innovative reach of sound than its predecessors, its realm and domain are much smaller and closer. It is strange, then, that while their earlier songs contained strong and vivid references to America’s landscape and heartlands, they never really named particular places; while Haywire, one of their most personal songs, name-checks particular places and, in terms, of the words on paper, gives a clear idea of where the song is set. But while before the unnamed and elliptically referred to places were of crucial importance, now, the locations, although specified, are of no consequence. There is an echo of songs gone by, as Louris suggests a phlegmatic view of the terrible life (that has gone “haywire”) he has suffered:
That's my whole life in a nutshell
Take it as you will
I can hear that old brass band
Playing our song down the hill
But this is a story of lost love, without much hope for the future. The song reaches a glorious zenith, and embarks upon a slow fade, with Louris and the band’s other singers criss-crossing imaginatively as they implore the person at whom he is singing to “smile, smile, smile”; but this doesn’t seem to be any reference to things “getting better”. His chances of a good life appear to have disappeared, and all that is left is to offer some simple advice to someone who – it seems – is in the driving seat in any case.
However, for all of the glum assessments and predictions found on Sound of Lies, Haywire did perhaps suggest something to the band – if not the listener- about the way forward. Smile. Because while their next record (released in 2000) is one of their weakest, leaning far too far towards a synthesiser-based sound, the lyrics of its key songs suggest a band once more beginning to reach upwards. The album’s title? Smile, of course.
Sound of Lies must really be seen as a reaction. The Jayhawks had made a bluesy album and then a nicely organic acoustic/electric album, both of which tried to make some sort of sense of America, through the eyes and ears of individuals and relationships. Gary Louris, having been freed of the folk music orientations of Mark Olson, retreated away from the philosophical big picture, which had perhaps squashed the chances for musical experimentation. With Sound of Lies, he let the music take charge, fitting emotional and personal tales around a dramatic and pleasing soundscape. But by the time the band wrote the songs for Smile, it seems that they wanted to reach up again, to a more positive message and themes. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, for instance, starts with fairly typical implied suggestions of two troubled lives inside a problematic world. But where there is no love, let us not lament – let us strain for it, let us create it, let us hold onto it:
I'm gonna make you love me
I'm gonna dry your tears
And we're gonna stay together
For a million years
The lyrics themselves are nothing special; but what they are saying is a notable shift in gear from the Jayhawks. And as they began to make that change, back to a more positive mindset, the music changed too. In 2003 they released Rainy Day Music, probably one of their most complete records, and it seems that as they made it, they remembered that the early Jayhawks didn’t just use that natural blend of electric and acoustic, of country music with bluesy sensibilities, of great personal songwriting with a good awareness of the world around; they created it. It was time to use it once more.
Rainy Day Music is not the Jayhawks’ deepest album, nor their most memorable, nor their most original. But it is their most melodic, and possibly their least flawed. Lyrically, it clearly contains mixed messages. There are pretty love songs, with plenty of ‘It’ll be alright’ sentiments; there are some songs which lean towards the darker extreme of the band’s songwriting scope; and there are others which return the band to their capacity to offer a glimmer – and often no more than that – of hope to the benighted. Over and above all else, this is a collection of individually well-crafted songs, and in terms of what it addresses, it doesn’t quite reach the big picture of the Jayhawks’ first few albums. But in a sense, they have come full circle, because that is their point about the American dream – it is intangible at best, and severely flawed at worst. If everyone is as individualistic – and as different – as the American dream assumes, then surely by the same token the answers are different for everyone as well. The big heading, the big solution, the American way, might not suit all.
The Jayhawks brought in Ethan Johns to produce Rainy Day Music, and in doing so, again, they showed a willingness to return to the alt-country scene they had helped create. Johns has produced a wide variety of artists, but most significantly in this context, he produced Ryan Adams’ first two solo albums. In moving from the poster-boy of alt-country to some of the founders of the movement, Johns brought with him his own particular take on the acoustic-electric blend: incredibly clear-sounding acoustic guitars, jingle-jangle electric guitar and slide playing off each other in an explicitly country manner, frequent bursts of harmonica, a bass which leads the song’s rhythm, and, most importantly given the Jayhawks’ history, a harmonic style which is more unplanned, off-the-cuff, and egalitarian.
Similarly, Rainy Day Music’s lyrics are mainly about options and solutions. Sure, there are problems in the world, in the lives of the songs’ protagonists. Rock music would be lost without such difficulties. But however vague the Jayhawks’ remedies and palliatives are, they are there, and this fact lends an air of reassurance and comfort to proceedings. In Save it for a Rainy Day, the guitars shimmer all over the song so that from the outset, you know that the sad life being described is going to collapse into something more positive:
Looking like a train wreck
Wearing too much makeup
The burden that you carry
Is more than one soul could ever bear
Don't look so sad, Marina
There's another part to play
Don't look so sad, Marina
Save it for a rainy day
This kind of sentiment recurs throughout the album, as Louris and Tim O’Reagan – a fine songwriter in his own right – exort the listener to take my love and make it last, and to make your mistakes and go on your way. Don’t look back. Even on the album’s darker moments, in songs like the inexorable Tailspin and the awkward and uncomfortable You Look So Young, this is a romantic album, with love and relationships as both cause and cure. There is a tension there which is never quite resolved, and it adds drama to what are already fine, melodic pieces of work.
Ultimately, however, we’re left in doubt that the over-arching dichotomy in the Jayhawks’ work, between the individualistic, independent American and the need for solace and reliance on others, can be satisfactorily closed. In Angelyne, amidst impeccably gelled harmonies and using a magnificently soaring melody, Louris brings home that old truth – that most of the time, most of the time, people get by on their own, if only because they have to:
Angelyne, forgive me
We threw it all away
I could never fit into your plans
I'm nobody's man
But that is only half the story. In a rare songwriting credit for bassist Marc Perlman, the band use the death of a close friend to give voice to that lingering feeling of regret that people often feel, for feelings not expressed, for dreams not fulfilled, before it is too late. But in the end there is hope, real belief in the value to human nature of that collectivist fall-back:
Will I see you in heaven
Shine your light from above
With your love I am never alone
Won't you carry me, won't you carry me home
And although the Jayhawks may well make more music further down the line, that seems to be as good an end-point as any. Compared directly with the Jayhawks’ first three albums, culminating with the groundbreaking Hollywood Town Hall, Rainy Day Music is substantially different: more ordered, more melodic, less bluesy. But given everything that occurred in between, all the miles of music the band travelled along, their most recent record is in many ways a nostalgic one. Taking the core elements of the genre – great songs, a small ensemble with emphasis placed with thought, and a real – if unspecific – location at America’s heart, the Jayhawks returned to the place they held at the peak of the alt-country scene. And in doing so, they completed their examination of the American dream, in which they relate real and imagined experiences to a world-view which goes far beyond such a bland and inadequate cliché. By really thinking, questioning what the limits and possibilities of that American dream really are, and by making fine music based on the sounds of the American country, the Jayhawks prove that they truly are an American band, in the best sense.
Labels: Alt-country, The Jayhawks
posted by Mike at 8:21 pm
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