Texas Was Clean is a plucky, whispery elegy to lands loved and left behind. A majority of the songs in this collection explore a time and place end ic to the narrator sense of self. The dissonance between the plaintive lyrics and the quick-t poed, lush instrumentalism nails the ambiguity of the otion, while also managing to create a rock song that is both fun and dirty. Musically, I was inspired by the feel of Paul Weller and The Jam, but then I also wanted this big orchestral bridge to mirror the feeling of lying in my bunk at night on the tOur Bus and drifting off to sleep scared but in awe of the process of life. Id rather have the strength to see through the lens of reality than rose-colored glasses, Ray says in reference to the raucous, rollicking Happy in the Sorrow Key. The elegiac, stripped-down sound pairs beautifully with tender lyrics that recognize addiction not as a denial of life, but as a dangerous insatiability for life (Killing yourself to keep from running out of life) turning the conventional addiction narrative on its head. It is a song about the desperate att pt to leave a bad situation where no amount of anything is ever enough. I was deeply affected by his death, but also know that addiction seldom spares the user. Regarding the aching ballad, If I Dont Leave Here Now, Saliers says, The song explores the terrible affliction of addiction and was partly inspired right after Philip Seymour Hoffman died. A multi-layered instrumentalism allows the long notes of the past to cradle the mid-t po of the present, a lush but understated orchestration. Circularity rings like a keening bell, dazzling and devastating. But the song is infused with new meaning in the juxtaposition of the boys lives with Ray father long-ago Florida boyhood so similar in its restlessness, its sweet violence. Here, the narrator is the observer reflecting on the tender recklessness of neighborhood kids, killing time in an abandoned copper mine, waiting to flee the confines of their small world, raging and hoping and fishtailing in the dark from the time that they are born. Fishtails tackles similar themes loss of innocence, coming of age but through a much different lens. What unfolds is pure narrative intuition, wherein the stuff of life, life inventory the pall of the impending Kent State massacre, Sexton poetry, Cathy grief-stricken, beer-drinking mom, the dad who never returned from Vietnam, the fence-scaling girl ripping jeans, the boy with wandering heart and hands, the smell of Trenton refineries and the slapping of the station wagon wheels are the metaphoric legs that carry the story and this song across time and distance. After we reach the violin held high-C and the heartbeat drums, and before Saliers kicks in with her chilling vocals, we hover, suspended in time, before landing gently on the hot asphalt of Grammy driveway in 1968, poking hot tar bubbles with a stickthe smell of the trash and leaves burning in the can. The dirge-like ballad Findlay, Ohio 1968 opens with a searing string and piano arrangement that feels like slipping through a tear in the space-time continuum. Louis Cemetery in Elizabeth, the sunny twist of Venice Chez Jay in Southern California is Your Girlfriend, and the devil-spawned Angola prison in Louisiana where three black men sat wrongly convicted for decades, confined in solitary. Place is a character rich in the universal specific: Boots on a board in a barn in Texas Was Clean, boys under the bridge on the river shoals off GA 9 in Fishtails, the New Orleans 1788 fire and the fence around the St. The album maps the dim corridors of the heart and mind, lifting and landing the listener across state lines and continents. memories here are more than specters they are evolutions. Theseemsongs are rooted in tradition and inventive, too: nourished in dark soils, leafing and luminous. One Lost Day has a feeling of music composed across time, not just in time. This is music of the past, present, and future a boundlessness earned and not bestowed. Vast in its reach, but unified by the traveler sense of wonder, gratitude, and pathy, One Lost Day moves like a centrifuge, pulling the listener close to linger in the small moment, then casting out onto sonic currents. The Indigo Girls (Emily Saliers and Amy Ray) release their sixteenth studio album, One Lost Day, on June 2nd, 2015.
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