Circle And Square, their second collaboration, again featuring contributions from bassist Mark Fain and drummer Lynn Williams with occasional piano by Finn Goodwin-Bain, this is another collection of original folksy Americana, the guiding theme being the act of creation in the face of an era of destruction, both natural and man-made, with music as the glue holding things together.
They kick off with circling fingerpicked and piano backed ‘10 to 4’, an existential musing on the enigma of time zones and different lives unfolding simultaneously in each (“Now it’s morning, walking out my door/You’re still in your bed/Ten ’til ten here, there it’s ten to four/And that’s hard to wrap your head around sometimes”), their voices overlapping in a musical representation.
A co-write between Jutz and Shawn Camp, ‘Thomas Hart Benton’ is a chugging folk blues that relates how, in 1973, aged 84, Benton was commissioned to paint a mural for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tex Ritter suggesting the roots of country music as its subject, resulting, two years later, in ‘The Sources O.f Country Music’ (“a picture of music, it’s an image of sound/Bold and bright tones of colorful paint/square dances going around and around/As the hoedown hillbilly fiddlers play”). However, in an ironic twist of fate, going to his studio to add a finishing touch to the image of a train, he collapsed and died, brush in hand, before he was able to sign his work.
Plucked on a sparse banjo, art is also the subject of ‘Diego In Detroit’ which relates to the Detroit Institute of Art where the marble inner courtyard displays the Detroit Industry Murals, 27 panels that, painted in 1932 and 1933 by Mexican artist Diego Rivera document America’s industrial might and the relationship of man and machine, man and nature and man across history, the lyrics also referencing how, while he was working, his wife, Frida Kahlo, would wander the city streets and take in Chaplin movies.
Evoking thoughts of Tom Paxton, piano returns for the gently waltzing ‘Circle And Square’, a Jungian archetypes contemplation of the mysteries of the unknown and how we devise universal frameworks to explain and interpret them, be that religion, language, art or music (“why should anyone care/About lines drawn with paper and pen/Shapes to ignore they just leave you bored/Brushed away time and again/But if you open your eyes you soon realize/They can be seen everywhere/They’re riddle and lore, symbol and door/Hidden but never not there”).
Written by Brace, ‘Nothing Hurts’ is a circlingly fingerpicked folk song with old time country colours, a tribute to and memory of the duo’s late brother in music. Peter Cooper, that takes the line “There will be no more sorrow on that heavenly shore” from the Carter Family’s ‘There’ll Be No Distinction’ as a spur to look beyond in an examination of loss (“No more sorrow/No more joy/No more ballgames/With the boy/No more music/No more words/ …Any day now/I’ll quit asking why/No more voices/In your head/Can’t hear them talking/Once you’re dead…Now the song is ending/Might not be done/Might need a line here/About the setting sun/If I could I’d ask you/To write me a better verse/But I can’t ask you nothing/Nothing hurts”).
Another old time country chugger, ‘Fontana Dam’ turns to a tale of environmental destruction through an act of creation, recalling how, in 1942, arguing it was needed to help in the fight against Japan and German, the Alcoa company convinced the TVA to build a massive dam on Fontana Lake in western North Carolina to power its nearby aluminium plants, resulting in the submerging of four towns and the displacement of thousands of residents, The cemeteries were relocated to a higher spot on the lake’s north shore so people could visit the family graves. It was promised that a road would be built to give access, but it was never completed, and all that exists is a hiking trail that leads through a tunnel that was part of the planned construction. As the song’s narrator laments, “Beneath the whispering birch and the buckeye/They are lying there alone/No road to lead me to them/In the trees along the shore”.
Written in Amsterdam during the same tour that produced the opening track and again with art as its touchstone, their voices come together for ‘Beckmann In The Frame’, a piano accompanied, gently fingerpicked song inspired by visiting Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the modern art museum of The Hague, and seeing an exhibit of the Jewish German painter Max Beckmann who fled to Amsterdam when the Nazi regime declared his art degenerate.
The power of art, be it through painting or words, to touch the mind, soul and heart also underpins ‘On The Back Of A Horse’ which, with appropriate Appalachian musical colours, recalls how, in 1935, the Works Progress Administration under President Roosevelt and championed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, introduced the Pack Horse Library Project to deliver books and other reading materials to isolated residents of Appalachia. Over a period of eight years, the librarians, mostly women, served 100,000 people in rural Kentucky, travelling by horse and by mule to get books to the families and the schoolhouses along their routes. The Eloise in the lyric might be fictional, but she embodies that magnificent work others like her did bringing “freedom found within the written word/On the back of a horse the universe/A world on every page/On the back of a horse the universe/A world on every page”.
Lyrics by Jutz and Cooper, set to a slow rolling folk style tune with guitar and piano by Brace, ‘Life Of The Mind’ pays tribute to the late Tom T. Hall and the music he lived and left behind (“There’s been enough singing/Gonna let all that go/But the wind sounds so sweet/At the Family Fold…Every ending is sad/That’s understood/But here in the garden/The living was good/Jesus and Will/And the brotherhood/Living a life of the mind”).
The album ends with ‘Wide Open’, a wistful, melodically circling duet with a fingerpicked solo break about how Jutz and Cooper spoke about always keeping a door open for ideas to work on or songwriters to work with, regardless of any commercial outcomes, the lines “I went to see a friend/It was raining without end that day/Coming down so hard/Making rivers in the yard…I said tell me if you will, do tell/Why let the wind inside/He turned to me and smiled/Said I keep the window open/To let in ideas unspoken” taken from something Bob Harris recalled about visiting Mike Oldfield. As Cohen said, it’s where the light gets in.
In a world that seems increasingly compelled to follow the path of destruction,Circle And Square is a reminder of the power of imagination, art, words and music to seek out and nurture life among the wreckage.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.redbeetrecords.com
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