By
Kevin McGrath
Submitted On February 06, 2016
Listening to Richard Buckner's debut album Bloomed for the very
first time, more than twenty years after its initial release, makes for a
rather disconcerting experience. It seems inconceivable, on the
evidence of this tenebrous masterpiece that Buckner did not go on to
become a major recording artist, with a string of classic country-folk
albums to his name. By the same token, given the record's pre-occupation
with heartbreak and suicide, you're left somewhat bewildered by the
fact that Buckner survived to tell his tale at all, let alone that he's
continued to influence alt. country luminaries like Justin Vernon and
Willy Vlautin right up to the present day.
Bloomed is a deliberately Spartan affair, though the restrained approach taken to the recording process by Buckner and renowned C&W producer Lloyd Maines works in the album's favour today. Indeed, its minimalist setting (long term Joe Ely band member Maines contributes shadings of pedal steel, dobro and three-string banjo) enables Buckner to "recite" his songs of solicitude with a clarity rarely found in popular music. It's surely significant, too, that Buckner chose to record the album in Texas, the home of America's greatest post-war troubadour Townes Van Zandt, the troubled country singer that he's so often identified with.
Anyone who compares the lyrical oeuvre of singer / songwriters, even those with the rare gifts of a Townes Van Zandt or a Richard Buckner, with the collected works of blue chip poets is skating on extremely thin ice. After all, there weren't too many budding Pablo Nerudas or Sylvia Plaths unburdening themselves on hootenanny night at Café Wha?, even at the height of the Greenwich Village folk revival. Bob Dylan (always the exception to any of rocks unwritten rules) was the only folk-singer in residence at Manny Roth's basement bolt-hole that could have looked the generation of chest beating poets mustered there straight in the eye without blushing.
And yet, Bloomed begins with a verse, that tempts us into the realms of poetic discourse -
'I've been stunned
And I've been turned
I've been undone and burned
I saw you as the answer to
Years of blue and wonder
Your voice shakes me through
But you don't know what I might be
You haven't seen the worst of me
But when your eyes move up I'm silent'.
Further into "Blue and Wonder" there are other fragments of songwriting worthy of our deliberation,
'The telephone was pouring blue
And when I hung up with you
I was sick and sad and wished I had
Just a kiss to bring you over'.
The track is tied together at the close with a neat, second hand confession-
'But I hear things, you know
I hear the bottle broke us down
But not a word from you yet
There's things that
Even a drunk will never forget'.
Bloomed, it turns out, is the kind of album where a heat of the moment put down, a missed phone call or a Dear John letter is likely to end in self-murder.
The bereft protagonist of "22" takes a bath with a kitchen knife having scrawled his last goodbye on the bathroom mirror -
'I didn't leave a letter
I just wrote my baby's name
On the mirror all steamed over
With water, heat, and shame'.
The song has a dime novel twist to add to the unfolding tragedy. As the broken-hearted lover slips into unconsciousness, his final earthly thoughts fixated on 'a phone call that never came', he hears, all too late, the 'phone let out a ring'.
Adam Brent Houghtaling's masterful tome, This Will End in Tears, an incredibly detailed history of melancholia in popular music attempts to make sense of our fascination with despondency. Beginning with the works of sixteenth-century lutenist John Dowland, and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, it takes in the careers of everyone from Frank ('I'm an 18 carat manic depressive') Sinatra, to the Macclesfield miserbalist himself, Ian Curtis and namechecks countless other long suffering artists, including Buckner. Houghtaling's forensic compendium leaves no stone unturned, ranging from an examination of the way the early Christian Church classified tears (there were five basic categories!), to shining a light on Max Hamilton's Rating Scale for Depression and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. Stack and Gundlach's 'The Effect of Country Music on Suicide', is revisited in an attempt to place the genre's darkest songs into some form of meaningful context. Buckner rates as high as 8 on Houghtaling's suicide/self harm chart, just below the likes of Metallica, Jackson Browne and Billie Holliday!
The chilling "Six Years", where another jilted lover goes to his watery grave, confirms why Buckner is firmly established inside the traumatised top ten!
'I went down to meet my maker
And the water tastes salty
What's on my lips
The letter you sent me'.
To be fair to Buckner, the body-count stops there (well, possibly), as the heartbroken lover of "Desire" deals with his despair by turning to drink, although death does seem to be permanently crouched in the shadows awaiting its chance -
'I've shot my insides out with grief and Mr. Kessler*,
all holed up in my room. Well, my dear, I miss you dearly.
Once, I thought this breeze would blow the orchard down.
I guess the fire never withered in me.
Until I die all I've ever leave is ash and tears that once was you and me'.
* Mr Kessler is an American blended whiskey.
Bloomed isn't unremittingly bleak, though. Buckner allows us a fleeting glimpse of happiness on the superb "Rainsquall", where he lets his voice slip its anchor as he sings with raucous optimism
'As the rain breaks through the branches
Along southbound forty-two
The green I grew left us
Wet-eyed red and bluebird blue
The moon's crying through the breaking clouds
As I pour through another town
There's lights off the coast and I love you most
When the rain comes weeping down'.
However, in Buckner's world it doesn't take long for the storm clouds to re-gather. By the song's end he's proclaiming, in his bruised baritone, that the good times are well and truly over -
'What I said my darling
And what you did my dear
Has left us in a downpour
Of misery and tears
And where are you tonight, I wonder
My wonder, where are you?
As the rain breaks through the branches
Along southbound forty-two'.
A similar tale unfolds on "Gauzy Dress in the Sun", although, this time the storyteller seems to believe that the good times outweigh the bad,
'And you made a liar out of me
But Lord, the things that I've seen
A Stone mountain star shower And you, lying next to me'.
A song's lyric has always been extraordinarily important to Buckner, and he's sometimes subscribed to Kevin Rowland's unique, some would say pretentious, approach to the art of song-writing. Rowland, a much underrated wordsmith himself, inscribed this piece of advice on the inner sleeve of Dexy's Midnight Runner's seminal debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels -
'Some of the words here are not necessarily used in the songs but we think they add to the picture'.
Two decades on from its conception Bloomed demands to be re-heard. Its twelve grief-stricken stories, fused into a singular song cycle of sorrow by Buckner and Maines makes it one of the most beautifully written records of the post Brill-Building era; a long lost roots masterpiece ripe at last for re-discovery and re-appraisal.
Bloomed is a deliberately Spartan affair, though the restrained approach taken to the recording process by Buckner and renowned C&W producer Lloyd Maines works in the album's favour today. Indeed, its minimalist setting (long term Joe Ely band member Maines contributes shadings of pedal steel, dobro and three-string banjo) enables Buckner to "recite" his songs of solicitude with a clarity rarely found in popular music. It's surely significant, too, that Buckner chose to record the album in Texas, the home of America's greatest post-war troubadour Townes Van Zandt, the troubled country singer that he's so often identified with.
Anyone who compares the lyrical oeuvre of singer / songwriters, even those with the rare gifts of a Townes Van Zandt or a Richard Buckner, with the collected works of blue chip poets is skating on extremely thin ice. After all, there weren't too many budding Pablo Nerudas or Sylvia Plaths unburdening themselves on hootenanny night at Café Wha?, even at the height of the Greenwich Village folk revival. Bob Dylan (always the exception to any of rocks unwritten rules) was the only folk-singer in residence at Manny Roth's basement bolt-hole that could have looked the generation of chest beating poets mustered there straight in the eye without blushing.
And yet, Bloomed begins with a verse, that tempts us into the realms of poetic discourse -
'I've been stunned
And I've been turned
I've been undone and burned
I saw you as the answer to
Years of blue and wonder
Your voice shakes me through
But you don't know what I might be
You haven't seen the worst of me
But when your eyes move up I'm silent'.
Further into "Blue and Wonder" there are other fragments of songwriting worthy of our deliberation,
'The telephone was pouring blue
And when I hung up with you
I was sick and sad and wished I had
Just a kiss to bring you over'.
The track is tied together at the close with a neat, second hand confession-
'But I hear things, you know
I hear the bottle broke us down
But not a word from you yet
There's things that
Even a drunk will never forget'.
Bloomed, it turns out, is the kind of album where a heat of the moment put down, a missed phone call or a Dear John letter is likely to end in self-murder.
The bereft protagonist of "22" takes a bath with a kitchen knife having scrawled his last goodbye on the bathroom mirror -
'I didn't leave a letter
I just wrote my baby's name
On the mirror all steamed over
With water, heat, and shame'.
The song has a dime novel twist to add to the unfolding tragedy. As the broken-hearted lover slips into unconsciousness, his final earthly thoughts fixated on 'a phone call that never came', he hears, all too late, the 'phone let out a ring'.
Adam Brent Houghtaling's masterful tome, This Will End in Tears, an incredibly detailed history of melancholia in popular music attempts to make sense of our fascination with despondency. Beginning with the works of sixteenth-century lutenist John Dowland, and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, it takes in the careers of everyone from Frank ('I'm an 18 carat manic depressive') Sinatra, to the Macclesfield miserbalist himself, Ian Curtis and namechecks countless other long suffering artists, including Buckner. Houghtaling's forensic compendium leaves no stone unturned, ranging from an examination of the way the early Christian Church classified tears (there were five basic categories!), to shining a light on Max Hamilton's Rating Scale for Depression and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. Stack and Gundlach's 'The Effect of Country Music on Suicide', is revisited in an attempt to place the genre's darkest songs into some form of meaningful context. Buckner rates as high as 8 on Houghtaling's suicide/self harm chart, just below the likes of Metallica, Jackson Browne and Billie Holliday!
The chilling "Six Years", where another jilted lover goes to his watery grave, confirms why Buckner is firmly established inside the traumatised top ten!
'I went down to meet my maker
And the water tastes salty
What's on my lips
The letter you sent me'.
To be fair to Buckner, the body-count stops there (well, possibly), as the heartbroken lover of "Desire" deals with his despair by turning to drink, although death does seem to be permanently crouched in the shadows awaiting its chance -
'I've shot my insides out with grief and Mr. Kessler*,
all holed up in my room. Well, my dear, I miss you dearly.
Once, I thought this breeze would blow the orchard down.
I guess the fire never withered in me.
Until I die all I've ever leave is ash and tears that once was you and me'.
* Mr Kessler is an American blended whiskey.
Bloomed isn't unremittingly bleak, though. Buckner allows us a fleeting glimpse of happiness on the superb "Rainsquall", where he lets his voice slip its anchor as he sings with raucous optimism
'As the rain breaks through the branches
Along southbound forty-two
The green I grew left us
Wet-eyed red and bluebird blue
The moon's crying through the breaking clouds
As I pour through another town
There's lights off the coast and I love you most
When the rain comes weeping down'.
However, in Buckner's world it doesn't take long for the storm clouds to re-gather. By the song's end he's proclaiming, in his bruised baritone, that the good times are well and truly over -
'What I said my darling
And what you did my dear
Has left us in a downpour
Of misery and tears
And where are you tonight, I wonder
My wonder, where are you?
As the rain breaks through the branches
Along southbound forty-two'.
A similar tale unfolds on "Gauzy Dress in the Sun", although, this time the storyteller seems to believe that the good times outweigh the bad,
'And you made a liar out of me
But Lord, the things that I've seen
A Stone mountain star shower And you, lying next to me'.
A song's lyric has always been extraordinarily important to Buckner, and he's sometimes subscribed to Kevin Rowland's unique, some would say pretentious, approach to the art of song-writing. Rowland, a much underrated wordsmith himself, inscribed this piece of advice on the inner sleeve of Dexy's Midnight Runner's seminal debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels -
'Some of the words here are not necessarily used in the songs but we think they add to the picture'.
Two decades on from its conception Bloomed demands to be re-heard. Its twelve grief-stricken stories, fused into a singular song cycle of sorrow by Buckner and Maines makes it one of the most beautifully written records of the post Brill-Building era; a long lost roots masterpiece ripe at last for re-discovery and re-appraisal.
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