The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park – and other matters

I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while, and while this is partly because I have been busy doing other things, it’s mainly because it has been a few months since I have been really grabbed, truly inspired, by new music.

I get through a lot of music – new albums, and old albums which are new to me – and perhaps the problem is that in the first half of 2006 I was spoiled rotten. Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions album; Alejandro Escovedo’s new album and two stunning live shows; a chance to digest Ryan Adams’s Jacksonville City Nights properly and then see him play several fascinating shows; discovering Guy Clark and Gram Parsons properly; and half a summer re-discovering Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. But more recently, I have found myself listening to music whose quality is clear but which is lacking in one important respect: a decent melody. I appreciate the mellow, country-blues picking genius of Rainer Ptacek, whose 17 Miracles: the Best of I bought not so long ago. As an hour long expression of heartfelt angst, I like Lucinda Williams’ new album, West. But that record seems to be a vehicle for Williams’ feelings and her ever-throatier vocals. And Glitter in the Gutter, the latest album by Jesse Malin, a favourite songwriter of mine, is mostly focused on his drive, his energy, and his love. All of these are good releases, but they’re not the records which make me smile, make me want to sing along, run across a grassy field, while I’m listening on my iPod walking along the Euston Road.

Things have got to the point where I’m ordering all manner of old music in order to find the melodies that make me want to listen again and again, stick on repeat, sing to myself all day. I’m currently awaiting recommended albums by Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Linda Ronstadt, following hot on the heels of Kris Kristofferson. But in the middle of all this over-analysis, I finally got round to listening to The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park (2006), the second album by Canadian singer-songwriter Justin Rutledge.

Rutledge’s first album, No Never Alone (2004), offered glimpses of what was to come. His music offers a wonderful sense of space and time, giving you time to breathe between irresistible melody and catchy hook. The most notable track is The Suffering of Pepe O’Malley (Pt. III). The song starts off normally enough, a rudimentary drum kit, pedal steel and picked banjo ushering in a moderately sad story of a lost love – made interesting by the occasional half-surreal, half-mundane imagery - “My tears rolled by like taxis”. But as the song builds itself up, you realise that the cities its characters come from are important in themselves – for now, Barcelona and Florence. But after two verses and choruses, just when you might expect the song to build into some sort of climax, it drops down several notches, into an extended instrumental jam, with plaintive bar-room violin and pedal steel taking up the banjo’s tentative suggestions, and creating a song within a song. And just as you think that’s it – it’s a two part song and all we have to look forward to is a fade – Rutledge’s faint shout ushers his own lyrics back in, and the promise of those Latin cities is brushed aside by a repeated, chanted epitaph to a doomed individual:

She said
I wanna die in Vienna
Listening to the Moonlight Sonata

There is real power in the rest of the song, as the mantra-like message is backed up by a beautiful band performance behind it, almost making you forget that you don’t really know what on earth he is talking about.

What is most interesting is that with the sheer quality of his melody, and lyrics which give away less than you’d hope, Rutledge’s song has real power – it makes you think that whatever image you have in your head as a result of the song, really is Vienna. In this respect, he is like Lucinda Williams – using good quality roots music to paint a picture of
a place. But while Williams’ pictures make some sort of sense, in that she uses native music - Cajun music to represent New Orleans, country-blues for Mississippi – Rutledge’s images seem to be completely from his own head space. I have never been to Vienna, and now I associate it with mandolins, pedal steel and a lazily brushed 4/4 drum sound. This can’t be right, but I sing this song to myself in my head so much that I’ve made it true.

Yesterday I was idly browsing in YouTube, and while watching Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris and the rest giving In My Hour of Darkness the 13 part harmony it doesn’t really need, I was struck by the fact that Justin Rutledge wouldn’t fit in on that stage. If he were present, it would be as a butterfly drifting dreamily over the stage. Because his voice is of a different quality than those of his more famous counterparts. Put simply, his voice is nicer. Sure, he doesn’t make you feel like you’ve just been romantically spat at, as Steve Earle does, and he doesn’t seem the type to conjure harmonies which tread a fine line between sweetness and jarring pain, in the manner of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But his voice is just so nice – so beautiful, so sad. The power of his singing comes from its sheer quality. When he wants to emphasise something, to make a powerful point from his intimate surroundings, he uses more subtle techniques. Sometimes he lets the music drift to near silence, and then lets the mandolin pick a brand new hook. Sometimes a tinny electric guitar enters the fray, clean as a whistle but within real menace in its message. And sometimes he just sings louder. All of these methods work, in fact they make perfect sense in the context of the subtlety of what his songs say. Every word, every stress, comes straight from him. Not put off by what the written lyrics look like, Rutledge doesn’t sing “Honey, this is war”. He sings “Honey, this is war”, stressing the first syllable instead of the last. We all know it’s war; the story, the battle, is about his attempt to convince one particular person. Everyone else is an onlooker.

Devil on a Bench brings together Rutledge’s voice, his natural sense of melody, his ability to tell us stories we don’t fully understand, and a bizarre capacity for inappropriate yet convincing place-shaping. If you come to this album having first listened to No Never Alone, you’ll find it hard to resist skipping straight to its sixth song – The Suffering of Pepe O’Malley (Pt. IV). The sequel to the previous instalment (don’t ask me what happened to parts I and II) doesn’t disappoint. It takes as read that we know about the desire to die in Vienna, and sets about telling us why the place is so inevitably tragic in his mind. The opening riff, repeated in what is presumably a conscious nod to the extended middle section of Part III, repeats itself over and over, but as we’ve already been warned about Vienna, this time he goes straight to the grim reality – the riff is electric, minor key and portentous; though still as infectious as you’d hope and expect. And starting with the word “see”, so as to make it clear what follows is an explanation, Rutledge’s first few lines tell us all we need to know:

See they’ve got armchairs in Vienna where a man would want to die
They’ve got Ludwig Van and garbage cans where the poets go to cry
In the boughs of some cathedral you can hear a lazy ghost
Scribble out his memoirs in a dusty petticoat

If you find this all a bit other-worldly, faux-historical, or just downright depressing, don’t worry. Elsewhere on the album, the constant theme of poignancy is presented more appetisingly, with personal stories, pleas and declarations back with tender pedal steel, gorgeous backing vocals (more like mini choirs at times) and thoughtfully and sparsely plucked stringed instruments. In Does it Make You Rain?, you won’t know whether to sing along with the singer or the guitars – that is until the second chorus, which follows a superbly executed verse: lines about stolen requiems are followed, with perfect timing, by that most down to earth of pop lyrics thrown into reverse: “Always on your mind”. But that isn’t quite it, as Rutledge ups the anguish and cries out “Cos honey, you’re on mine”. And this time, the chorus seems to bring it all together – the singer, his subject, the autumn leaves which act as a convenient poetic device in the chorus, and the listener.

That song is matched for stateliness and emotional impact by the very next song, Come Summertime. Starting hesitantly, with a story of a night-time horse ride, the song brings in more instruments, with a piano making a rare foray to the front of the sound, and Rutledge’s excitement grows as he gets to the song’s main declaration

You’ll be mine
Come summertime

It is difficult to explain the impact of these lines, but it is real. It is possibly the identity you want to feel with the narrator – we all have everyday experiences which we inject with our own special touches, whether real or imagined. The specifically named placed (“Marguerita Strand”) elevate the memory to an emotional event in Rutledge’s mind, and his vocal seems to reflect this. As ever, whichever instruments he chooses to employ don’t stand out for any moments of individual virtuosity or surprise. Instead, they use a measured grace and a traditional style to fill in some – though not all – of the gaps left between Rutledge’s perfectly-crafted lines.

So Devil on a Bench wends it way through other such moments, past the painful but necessary Pepe IV, towards its penultimate track – This Is War. The song starts by combining the measured and spare ensemble playing of the album’s earlier songs with the minor key menace of Pepe IV, with a swinging drum kit joined by low-range electric guitar. When Rutledge beings to sing, the end of each line is sung in little more than a sorrowful quaver, as a combination of ambivalence and fatalism drive the story onwards:

I’ve got Alaska on my mind
The mountain range a crooked spine
Frost bitten moon among the pines
Sometimes it snows
The rearview mirror telling lies
Of where we’ve been and how time flies
If you can’t look me in the eyes
Then so it goes
Take your dress from off the floor
I’m not the man I was before
Ain’t this what we’ve been fighting for?

But we’re then left suspended, the inevitable lyrical hook of the song not quite delivered, a soulful harmonica instead playing a brief interlude, and we have another verse of rural and personal apocalypse, punctuated by an increasingly fervent electric guitar and an ever more angry singer, before the killer line and emotional focal point of the album: “Honey, this is war”. For the rest, a fuzz-toned guitar and Rutledge’s repeated shouts of that line compete for emotional space if not real musical room (of which there is plenty). And although there is one more song on the album, which rounds it off with what is by now that fairly familiar mix of cheeriness and impending doom, I’m Gonna Die (One Sunny Day), it is with This Is War that Rutledge rounds off the stories and feelings that represent Devil on a Bench. The transposition of war into a personal tale is not a original idea, but after an execution so perfect, there is little more to be done.

My only remaining problem is that if I want to continue my search for more records combining original melodies and that Americana country sound, I am going to have to drag myself away from Justin Rutledge’s two albums. I don’t think I am have been permanently repelled from music which concentrates more on the energy, the instrumental brilliance, or some other quality unrelated to melody. But by adding his original and irresistible tunes to that modern country small band sound, Justin Rutledge has reminded me why the Beatles were quite so popular, and why the Jayhawks are better everyday listening than Uncle Tupelo. For that, and for improving my walks along the Euston Road, I am grateful.