Our reservations about the oeuvre of a favourite artist are telling, instructing us about who we take that artist to be, about what is essential to them. It is a bad habit, but I like, I must admit, reading the lyrics of Jandek’s songs as they are reproduced at Seth Tisue’s website, as they are not on the stark, almost bare album covers put out by Corwood Industries.
Excitedly anticipating the new album, a document of a suite of songs performed live at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, I cannot resist going through the lyrics in advance. And what do I find? For me, a disappointingly personal string of lyrics – lyrics which do not obscure what they are about; lyrics that demand to be read literally, as though they were a document of the experiences of the lyricist.
This is a disappointment, of course, which says a great deal about me and my relationship to Jandek’s music – which says everything about what I take Jandek to be and more, what I want Jandek to be, as though Jandek were only the blank screen upon which I would project my fantasies.
What I want are lyrics that are oblique, and ride the music obliquely – lyrics that speak directly of nothing, but send speaking, singing, on a vast impersonal detour – a detour as vast as that taken by the music itself from the idiom to which it belongs and does not belong. I want it that what is sung does not ask to be taken literally – that it is vague enough, open enough, to encompass all the readings that are brought to it. Not that they can be made to say everything and nothing, but that what is said – sung – is done so with the voice, with the music, so that it belongs with the mood of the vocalising and the music itself, lowering itself into as into a bath.
I want the lyrics to ride a mood, not to convey something extraneous to the mood (the lyrics of the love songs of When I Took That Train sit too strangely with the creeping sadness of the music, of the singing), nor to double up that mood, literalising it, as I suspect is happening with the first of the songs (which I have not yet heard) of Manhattan Tuesday (but certainly there is the same doubling up on Newcastle Sunday …) I want the mood to attune the lyrics – for the lyrics to fit the voice and the music, to be borne along by it without forcing itself into my attention.
True, my disappointment comes from my foolishness for reading the lyrics in advance of hearing the songs themselves. But what does this reveal about who I take Jandek to be? What do I want from Jandek, that sees me, too, exclude his early collaborative albums from my idea of Jandek?
An anecdote instead of a direct answer. As I looked at Jandek’s album covers, I thought at once of the second Palace album, that became known as Days in the Wake. The curtains behind the face in shadow on the cover, and the shadowy face itself seemed a homage to Jandek, as did the recording techniques on the album itself – straight to reel-to-reel (or was it a simple cassette recorder?) in Will Oldham’s kitchen. And I felt a disappointment: why was it necessary to make a homage? And why did Will Oldham turn from these early recording techniques, letting his albums become ever more lush?
Foolish thoughts, because I like those later albums, and their production. Foolish, but revealing, because it seems I want an artist who remains him- or herself, an artist strong enough to remake the idiom of which they are part, and to brace themselves against the world, against production techniques, say, and against appearing simply and easily as themselves on their record sleeves. Foolish, as I said.
And I thought at once of Smog’s Doctor Came at Dawn, and how that was essential album of Bill Callahan’s oeuvre, insofar as it stayed with a mood, lowering itself into it, remaining with it, attuning itself to it, lyrics following the grain of the music, and of Bill Callahan’s own baritone. That album, rather than the albums that came after – because I want an artist to pursue their own legitimate strangeness (Char), to follow the course of what only they can provide – in the case of a singer, that follows the grain of their voice, their vocalising.
This is why, for example, I admire the solo albums of Jason Molina, Let Me Go and The Magnolia Electric Co. – albums of a mood, that follow the course of a mood in a suite of songs. That follow the depths of that mood, letting themselves be carried by it (and this also so, magnificently, for the best songs of Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love). As though there was a kind of necessity to that mood, a claim that claimed music, lyrics, everything.
Listening to Jandek, I thought: why did Bill Callahan give up on that mood on later albums? Why did he fall short of it, relying overly on Jim O’Rourke’s production on Red Apple Falls (compare this album with O’Rourke’s Bad Timing)? Again, a foolish thought, but a revealing one: what I wanted of an artist was the pursuit of a mood on album after album. The mood borne by a voice, by a singing, by a playing … and with lyrics that rose from that mood.
And what did I find with Jandek – my Jandek? The continuity of a mood (in my imagination) that ran the course of 50 albums, give or take. Or rather (for me) that discovered itself on Ready for the House and resurfaced at intervals as the real Jandek, the only one. A myth, a fantasy. Then I would want lyrics to be part of the song, and the song a part of a suite, the suite an album, and an album an oeuvre of albums, one after another.
One after another, and released without compromise – recorded on reel-to-reel and self-released, being dependent on no record company. And the artist getting out of the way of the music, letting it be (as Will Oldham and Bill Callahan both do, in their own way). Yes, that’s what I wanted and let myself find (in my imagination) with Jandek.
In my foolishness, I suppose that what I want to hear is an address – a kind of sincerity in music that has nothing to do with what a singer intends to say or hear. A sincerity that bears the music as it arises from a mood, from the simplicity of a mood. That lets itself be discovered in the singing, in the music by the audience but also by the artist, who thereafter must follow that mood, be faithful to it, as though it were a path of research. And this movement would bear both audience and artist; both would be orientated by the same endless task: to follow a mood to its end, to follow the grain of the wood.
The journalist who tracked down Seymour Smith, the chief performer in the ensemble Jandek (an ensemble of just one, for the most part) told him she didn’t get his music. ‘There’s nothing to get’, said Smith. Nothing to get – nothing to seize upon, nothing to cognise. There is only the claim of the music, of the mood of the music, in its simplicity, its demand. A demand you may feel, and that will bear you, entranced, from album to album, or that you will not.
‘There’s nothing to get’, and in my imagination, Jandek was a way Smith gave himself to the demand of a mood, which did not reflect easily and simply his everyday life, but revealed the claim of the music Jandek could not help but make. The demand of a mood as necessity, and a necessity that was never simply autobiographical, but reflected what his voice could do, and what his hands playing a guitar could do. A ‘could’ here, an ability, where freedom gives way to necessity, and it is not a question of choice, but of being chosen.
This was why, in my imagination, he could refuse to compromise, to release his albums through record labels, to give interviews: it was to assist the mood, to follow its grain even as he sought to release his recordings, to get them out there. To assist it by refusing to get in the way of the music, of providing his own interpretations of what there was to ‘get’. And in this sense, there was and is nothing to ‘get’, nothing to seize upon. Except a kind of attunement, a mood that will make a claim upon some and not others.
A mood, in my imagination, that was such that it depersonalised the singer, the musician, until he wandered according to a kind of fate. An impersonal fate; written before he was born. Written in his flesh and his flesh as written. If this was depression, then let it be so. If it was a constitutive melancholy, then let it again be so. But follow it, even as it tore you from yourself, as it widened your soul until you were more than a person.
A depression that no one suffers because there’s no one there to suffer: an impersonal body, and without an ‘I’. And an impersonal body that called out to other such bodies, to bodies attuned to melancholia, and not necessarily because they were depressive themselves. But bodies ready to be so attuned, and to follow the course of that attunement, as it rode itself from album to album. Oh beautiful thought!
Perhaps, here, I am not so wrong. Perhaps it is why the lyrics that speak explicitly of depression, which articulate that depression obtrude all too much – as though, now, the lyricist revealed the key to his oeuvre. A lifelong depression. A temperament of melancholy. Was this what there was to ‘get’? But no, I have not yet expressed my reserve about the lyrics on the new album (an album, I emphasise, I have not heard). Is it that the lyrics translate too unambiguously the language of the clinic into song? Is it that they speak too directly, too readily of what cannot be grasped in such language, and flees from it?
I want to think instead of a sincerity that bears Jandek’s music (my Jandek) – of that desire to communication, to make communication tangible, thick, that means these albums must be released (‘how can I shift some units?’, he asks his interviewer). Let sincerity be the name of what bears a mood, of what lets a mood dwell immanently in what is said. Let it name a kind of saying that laps forward in the said, which repeats itself, saying the same, the same, the same each time, but saying it newly, researching and pushing forward, giving life to a mood, and letting necessity speak. A saying, now, that is more than any individual could explain about the music, and that pushes Seymour Smith aside so that Jandek makes music and Jandek makes song.
A beautiful thought. And what else do I want? To say that this mood, for which depression and melancholy are never quite names, loops through all the sadness of the world, that quivers through all sadness as cosmic strings are said to pass through all matter. That it is not only Jandek that is faithful to this mood, or that Jandek’s faith answers to a faith others cannot help but have. All sadness, then, everyone’s sadness – that’s what loops through the music, that’s what joins it together like a cosmic string.
And now imagine all of music as just such a series of strings, passing through everything in joy and sadness, in every mood, and that this is the universe, these wandering strings, leaping up like flares on the surface of sun, great loops by which mood returns to itself as it sings of itself.
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