What I'm Thankful For: A Bad Journal Prompt, Answered

I’ve been more deliberate about seeing live music the past few months. Since August, I’ve listened to the youthful and plucky (Lord Huron) and the sadly ill-attended (E-40). The most harrowing live experience I’ve ever had was in early October at a Fiona Apple show. She was heckled on stage and the last ten minutes of the set were a prolonged, excruciating ordeal of tears, profanity, tirades, and the worst kind of audience participation: shouting matches and spiteful Balkanization. There’s no other way to describe that sour mix of Portland hipsters and a frail songwriter genius on a bad, bad night. Despite all of that, I’ve enjoyed the groovin’ indie of Laura Veirs and the affable bluegrass of the North Pacific String Band. It’s been a good little ride. Easily the best show of the season happened two nights ago at the Holocene Lounge in East Portland. Swearin’ and Waxahatchee were in town, and the cold November frost warmed in their friendly, grungy glow.

            Google these two bands and the biography emerges quickly: twin sisters from Alabama (Katie and Allison Crutchfield)  have been playing in punk bands for years (The Ackleys, Bad Banana, P.S. Eliot, etc.). They parted ways a few years ago when Katie wanted more creative control. The sisters remain close, but the two bands, Swearin’ (Allison) and Waxahatchee (Katie) reflect different directions. Swearin’ is an up-tempo, collaborative effort whereas Waxahatchee is quieter and more confessional. Swearin’ is a group; Waxahatchee is a personality. They complement each other, especially when they share a stage, as they did for this show.

            Both bands may as well have come from the year 1995.  To me, this is the most remarkable trait of their sound. The band members are all in their mid-twenties, firmly entrenched in the millennial generation, and yet the audience was, on average, a decade older. With quiet verses and ebullient, distorted choruses, their songs channel Nirvana and the Pixies. I was grinning most of the show—it was like I’d gone back in time. Transfixed, the audience nodded and tapped their feet during many songs that (I imagine) they would have moshed to in middle school.

            But it isn’t just nostalgia that makes these two great. Swearin’, for example, can sound like Pavement, Liz Phair, or Blink 182, depending on the singer or the tempo, but the experience is unique: the songwriting itself holds up. They’ll veer between silliness and honesty, often in the same song. “Watered Down,” off their new album, crashes around like a drunken old friend, and then suddenly quiets, to reveal a long-kept secret. Volume and guitar swings between these extremes until “Watered Down” stumbles into its sloppy, satisfying conclusion. I like Swearin’. I bought their t-shirt.

            It’s hard to write about that night’s headliner, Waxahatchee, without hyperbole. Waxahatchee is the best band I’ve heard in several years. Katie Crutchfield’s solo project has been received with near-unanimous  acclaim, especially this year’s Cerulean Salt, an album that’s already made several “best of 2013” lists from major publications. Whatever. Seeing Crutchfield live, I don’t get the impression that she cares about the mainstream. Waxahatchee’s set was subdued and controlled. She said very little to the crowd; she seemed almost shy (the encore, while excellent, was hurried, and only prefaced by a timid “thank you”). The music of Cerulean Salt comes from a strange other place, where music exists as art and not commodity.

             Waxahatchee owes a lot to nineties grunge, but it’s much more than a quaint tribute. Like Swearin’, the songwriting is supreme. Many of the arrangements would not work on the radio, despite their potential catchiness. The less-than-two-minute song “Misery over Dispute” is essentially two choruses, and that’s it. “American Weekend,” off her first album, is the opposite: three verses separated by instrumentals where every other musician would try to squeeze in a chorus. “Dixie Cups and Jars” is the length of a radio hit, but it builds and builds to nothing—a thoughtful meditation on a family event that had no clean conclusion. The songs on Cerulean Salt do not sound like each other as each one claims its own space and stands alone. The album’s effect, of course, is mosaic.

            Because the lyrics are personal and erudite—Crutchfield is inspired by southern literature and confessional poetry, and it shows—the temptation would be to make Cerulean Salt acoustic and spare. Wisely, Crutchfield layers the album with electric bass and distortion. This is a trick that hasn’t been used as effectively since Nirvana. The growl of the album’s louder moments only highlight the quiet devastation of the focused lyrics. Think of the contrast of “Lithium” and you have much of the sound of Cerulean Salt. This is an evolution for Waxahatchee; the first album was more subdued overall. Happily, much of the songs off that album were “grunged up” for the concert, and the effect was wholly positive.

            I’m glad that 2013 has been a good year for Swearin’ and Waxahatchee. There was a fun vibe at the show, like we were witnessing an ascent, like there will be many bright days ahead for these talented acts. I don’t know where mainstream music will head, and I have my doubts, but for these two, I’m thankful.

            

An Essay for American Lit Class

In his essay Nature, Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson attempts to understand man’s relationship to the natural world. Nature is divided into eight chapters with titles like “Commodity,” “Idealism,” and “Spirit.” To me, the most interesting chapter is “Beauty.” Here, I believe Emerson has put into words the reason that I choose to spend my time, money, and energies outside.

There are all kinds of recreational reasons to get outdoors: the thrill of skiing, the exercise of trail running, the nourishment of harvesting fish and game. Underneath these advantages, the real reason I go outside is simply to be in nature—to exist in a different space. Like Emerson, I find just being there is enough. I agree with him that “the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and of themselves”—that the value of the natural world is intrinsic (Emerson 21). When I run through the hills outside my house, I’m thankful for the elevated heart rate, but I remember the visceral experience. On a November morning, when the logging road climbs above Lewisburg Saddle and into the Coast Range, I am swallowed whole. My route becomes an ominous tunnel flanked with Douglas Fir: fog and drizzle above, pine needles and mud below. I could burn the same calories on a treadmill; the running is secondary. What invades my imagination is the shape of the trees as they melt into the clouds and the roar of the wind through their branches. Some might look at this loop of road as a profitable place to harvest timber. Others might see it as a seven-mile track, only a training ground for longer runs. To me, and Emerson, the forest has its own intrinsic value and needs no other qualifying measure taken of its life-giving beauty.

Deciding that “the primary forms” are enough on their own, Emerson accurately makes the connections between nature and art. He writes that creating “art throws life upon the mystery of humanity” and that “[a work of art] is the result or expression of nature, in miniature” (26). In other words, a painting that illuminates the human condition is a tiny window into the grandeur of nature. Emerson sees this beauty reflected in the variety of forms that nature takes, such as the veins of a fallen leaf or the contours of a mountain range. To go into nature, then, is to walk into the painting.

I try to get into that painting. In the Fryatt Valley in the Canadian Rockies, there’s a campsite at the edge of an alluvial fan. This rocky place, eleven miles from the nearest road, is otherworldly. The streams rise and fall daily with the changes in glacier snowmelt: high in the sunny afternoon, low in the frozen mornings. Mist moves over the nearby peaks. The trees cling to the mountainsides at the edge of the gravel plain, interrupted only by avalanche scars. Great white bolts of ice sear into the limestone cliffs thousands of feet above my camp stove, where I am a tiny shape, attempting to heat the snowmelt for my coffee. I go to these places just to exist, for a day or two, inside the art. Emerson said that “[t]he eye is the best of artists”, in that the eye makes sense of the infinite painting that we can exist in, if we choose to look at the universe the right way (21).

If we accept that art has the ability to be transcendent, to elevate us out of our ordinary perceptions, then it stands to reason that nature, the wellspring of art, can be transformative. “To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company” Emerson wrote, “nature is medicinal” (22). Increasingly, I need this medicine. Blinking under the fluorescent lights of my classroom, staring at a computer screen, I feel portions of my soul wither and fade. The emptiness of a shopping center terrifies me; the hollow diversion of the internet disappoints me. “Cramped” by the trappings of modern life, I escape to more remote locales.

Last Thanksgiving, desperate to flee the slog of fall term, I drove south. Over the Cascade Range, into bleak Nevada, over snowy California plains, and finally down into a warm valley, my friends and I hurried to find someplace remote. Upon arriving at Death Valley, we paused. There was a tremendous silence in that desert. Clumps of mesquite collected at the edge of a broad white wash. Eleven thousand feet of relief, from the summit of Telescope Peak to the floor of the valley, was visible to the west. To the east, the Amargosa Range turned pink as the sun went down. If this were a painting, there would be three significant bands running parallel across the canvas: a blue star-flecked sky, a bar of crumpled mountains, a white stripe of desert at the bottom. Ennobled by the beauty, we wandered into the picture and became a piece of the art. The air was warm and dry, redolent of mesquite. All of it—the quiet, the majesty, the absence of distractions—had a way of gently mending the dead places in our souls.

Because art can be rejuvenating, because nature is the highest form of art, and because our human eye when beholding nature is the best artist, I try to get outside. I structure my life in a way that work, the business of making money so I can eat and have shelter, becomes a placeholder for sojourns in the wild. My next trip is to a familiar spot: Furnace Creek at Death Valley, between two enormous mountain ranges, this coming winter break.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Robert D. Richardson. Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. New York: Bantam, 1990. Print.