FEATURE: Spotlight: Carson McHone — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Carson McHone

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I do not feature too many…

Country and Americana artists in my Spotlight feature. It is an oversight, and one I am trying to rectify. I only recently came across the music of Carson McHone, but I really love what she does. Her latest album, Still Life, is magnificent! Certainly one of the musical treasures of the year so far! I am building everything to a review of that album. Before I get there, it is worth putting in some background and interviews with the fabulous artist from Austin, Texas. Her debut album, Goodluck Man, came out in 2015. Since then, she has built her sound and fanbase. McHone is an artist that everyone needs to check out:

“There is something almost excruciating about the places in between. The feeling of falling. A reassertion of gravity as one step leads to another but just before the foot lands. The purgatory between borders, before clarity becomes whole.

Still Life, Carson McHone’s third album and second release with Loose Music, quivers like a tightrope, with songs about existing within such tension and surviving beyond the breaking point. These are stories of sabotage, confusion, and surrender. The album is a testament to the effort of reaching, sometimes flailing, for understanding and for balance. Still Life invites us to gasp at our own reflection and acknowledge the unsettling beauty in this breath.

McHone’s 2018 internationally released Carousel (Loose Music), produced by Mike McCarthy in Nashville, was a reimagining of songs from her formative years coming of age playing in Texas bars. It established her as a shrewd lyricist who raises unconventional questions with language equally at home in a short story or a poem. Still Life addresses a broader picture. It is thematically more refined and yet more daring. McHone’s voice remains front and center, but it’s richer, darker. Wielded more than woven. A gorgeously wrought instrument for pushing meaning forward.

McHone wrote the songs of Still Life in quiet moments between tours in her hometown of Austin, then recorded in Ontario with Canadian musician and producer Daniel Romano. McHone says of the session, “Daniel is a perceptive player, and his response was intuitive and organic. We attacked these songs as a blank canvas. Shadows sharpened and came to life as full vignettes that felt familiar in a magical way, a product of keeping things emotionally open. I think we picked up on things that were unwritten.” Together in a home studio they cut almost the entire record themselves, calling on two friends, the versatile Mark Lalama on accordion, piano, and organ, and David Nardi with some savvy saxophone, to round it out. The phrasing and tones recall John Cale, The Kinks, Richard and Linda Thompson—like-minded artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s, another era of transition and innovation.

On Still Life, this first-time collaboration between McHone and Romano reveals a compelling dynamic; the musical punctuation is intricate, erratic, and at times even playful. The arrangements provide texture to the landscape of the songs while sustaining the underlying thematic tension. The album opens with “Hawks Don’t Share,” a literary allusion to the creative sabotage that often confronts artistic alliance. A pair of sparring electric guitars sets the scene, mirrored in the line, We’re both boxers babe/ we don’t make love. Bright horns pop between phrases overtop a tight rhythm section. A jangly twelve-string leads into a driving chorus with big vocal harmonies and layered synth. The title track plays out an anguished spiraling.

Right at the point where language fails, the vocals break away into fuzz guitar and violent, incessant piano, as if the turmoil can only be expressed by music. In “Sweet Magnolia,” the strings, horns, and piano create a perfect orbit for the mannered intensity of a song that soars but is essentially spoken. “End of the World” builds with dark and dissonant violins over a repetitive major guitar progression, leaving us hanging on its final line, “Tell me what do you know of restraint?”. The punchy sax and tumbling toms of “Only Lovers” play into the ruse of pretending you haven’t already fallen when you have. The background vocals are like a playground taunt. On the buoyant “Someone Else,” McHone’s assured vocal delivery cuts to the punch: I’m caught between the two/ sweet despair and hope renewed/ say it ain’t profound babe. Behind her, the rollicking organ and hammering piano conspire to bust down the door and pull us along.

More than timeless, Still Life is timely, inherently modern, immediate. The final song, “Tried,” acts as a kind of eulogy for the in-between spaces these songs embody. The bardo one must emerge from. The album challenges us to take responsibility for what we experience and how we negotiate gravity moving forward. Still Life summons us to the present in all its complexity, daring us to join in the deliberation. Here is an exposé of conscience, and a confirmation of the inherently hopeful act of creation.

Let’s find a new language to use so we’re not confused”.

I did not know much about her prior to coming to this feature. It has been fascinating researching. I want to combine a couple of recent interviews. SPIN chatted with McHone about Still Life. She is someone whose musical has grown and diversified since her debut. It is hard to categorise and define her sound:

“Despite growing up around a subculture of musicians doing their best to mimic cowboy tropes, McHone was more interested in how songs become timeless and manifest in succeeding generations. “I grew up listening to a lot of Celtic music,” she continues. “I’ve always loved melodies that feel ancient but so, so urgent and still relevant.” As a result, McHone’s been able to assimilate folk, grunge, blues, and yacht rock sounds into kinetic, breathable compositions.

Four years after Carousel, she’s blossomed far beyond the genres she’s never fit into. Her Merge Records debut, Still Life, is a sweeping collection of technicolor and crooning balladry, a country vibrato that toes the line between alternative and Americana. The record’s orchestral arrangements, supplied by Ontario bulwark Daniel Romano, turn McHone’s songwriting three-dimensional. The project germinated at the beginning of the pandemic, when she and Romano retreated to Toronto and used the country’s lockdown protocols to hone their compositional chemistry and generate a palette of arresting, streamlined lyricism. “It’s the first record I’ve made where it’s an intimate thing between just two people,” McHone says.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chad Wadsworth

The night before our video call, McHone says she watched Cool Hand Luke for the first time. She quickly picked up on the parallels between the infamous “failure to communicate” line and her own, “let’s find a new language to use so we’re not confused,” in “Fingernail Moon.”

“That’s all we’re trying to do, communicate, and the language that we use is so personal and it’s all based on our past experience, the things that we collect,” she says. “You have to, first, be in touch with yourself to know what you want to say, but then there’s this element of mystery about how people are going to interpret it.”

Taking linguistic inspiration from books like A Moveable Feast and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McHone is a vivid storyteller. Her lyrics have always been solemn, straight-to-the-point yet spacious; emotionally sprawling and inviting, even in her barnstorming, DIY days. During the zenith of “End of the World,” she asks the listener: “Tell me what do you know of restraint?” It’s a question McHone’s been workshopping the answer to because she writes such acute, centered language – but it’s her interactions with liminal space, and her articulation of tension, that establishes such good resonance. She, beautifully, gives us her life story, but empathetically leaves room for us to glean our own stories from it, too. “As an artist, the catalyst for involving yourself in the creative process is very personal, but you do have to take into account your audience,” McHone adds. “You want to be understood, but you also want to allow people to arrive themselves”.

I think that Still Life is one of the best albums of the year. Glide Magazine shared similar sentiments when they spoke with the remarkable Carson about Still Life recently:

“It’s only February, but I feel confident in saying that one of the best albums you will hear this year is Carson McHone’s Still Life, due out this Friday, February 25th on Merge Records. The Austin-based singer-songwriter has been performing much of her adult life and forged a respectable folk-rock meets country sound on her previous full-length albums, 2015’s Good Luck Man and 2018’s Carousel. Yet Still Life exists on a higher plane. The album is rich with instrumentation that feels full and commanding yet warm and inviting, with sentimental accordion, twelve-string guitar, horns, choir-like background vocals, and organ all coming together in one beautiful symbiotic wave of sound. McHone also seems to be tapping into a range of new influences, including British folk-rock, soul, 60s and 70s pop, and glam rock, all of which form a sound that, mixed with her complex lyricism, is vibrant and timeless. In other words, Still Life is not the kind of album you throw on once and forget about.

To make the album, McHone decamped far from her home base in Texas to the Great White North of Ontario. Here she linked up with the prolific Daniel Romano, who somehow found a break from constantly releasing albums to be able to produce and record the album along with a handful of super talented players. Romano – who has never been afraid to take his sound in new directions and shift from a country album to psych rock to paisley pop and more – clearly has a chemistry with McHone as Still Life truly feels like a collaborative effort.

As we emerge to a state of normalcy after a depressing couple of years, Still Life is exactly the piece of art that can lift spirits. McHone, who hasn’t played a show in two years, will also be hitting the road this spring with Romano and his band where she will undoubtedly treat listeners to these new songs. Recently, she took the time to chat about the making of the album, finding its sound, musical inspirations, collaborating with Romano and more.

You seem to be moving away from a more country-influenced sound to something a little more rooted in pop and soul on this new album. Were you consciously pushing towards a different sound than your last album?

I just followed where the songs lead. It’s not so much that my interests have changed, it’s more so that I’m learning how to listen to things more as a creator, in a way that I can pick things out and put them to use myself.

You worked with Daniel Romano in Canada on this album. Did being away from Texas and working with Daniel make you approach the music in a different way?

Daniel has made all kinds of music over the years and as we explored different feels, he could facilitate different options on the drums, or bass, guitars, etc. We made this record in the living room, because that’s where we were, and because things were locked down, but I do believe that making it when and where we did gave me some healthy perspective. Approaching these tunes in a completely different space, faraway from the place where I’d written them, physically and emotionally, solidified them – the things they carried either fell away or became clearer and more potent, standing there stripped of context and with a different backdrop.

When were these songs actually written? Would you say you were inspired to write during the pandemic?

All of these songs were written prior to the pandemic, but recorded during a lockdown, and the album seems to embody that time in an uncanny way. Time and space seemed to hover in this strange limbo, which is where these songs exist, in these elevated moments of introspection – it was a sort of pause, but it’s in that beat that change can begin, a shift can happen – the literal isolation allowed me that in a way”.

I want to end with a review for the stunning and instantly affecting Still Life. Holler. commended the range and excellence of Carson McHone’s third studio album:

“With Still Life, Carson McHone proves just how broad a church Americana really is; stirring up her own personal melting pot of musical experimentation and influences to create a diverse third full-length album.

From listening it becomes clear why she’s drawn comparison to the likes of Gillian Welch. Throughout the record, she displays a similar mastery of poetic lyrics, written from her hometown of Austin, Texas, then taken north across the border to Canada, to be arranged and recorded with producer Daniel Romano in Ontario.

The album’s title track has mazy guitar lines and genuine Americana warmth that pulls back and forth around McHone’s direct vocals. She nods towards Tom Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers, on ‘Hawks Don't Share’, with its duelling guitars, economical delivery and power pop undertone, as she sings: “I’ve got a soft spot for your madness and your fierce embrace / And the quiet violence in your face.” This pop-orientated approach is also heard in ‘Someone Else’, a jumpy and urgent track, and on ‘Only Lovers’, with its ironically jolly arrangement.

At its best, Still Life ticks every emotional and musical sweet spot, perhaps most notably with ‘Sweet Magnolia’, as McHone tries to avoid looking back with rose-tinted spectacles, lyrically capturing shades of Randy Newman’s peerless, pin-sharp evocations of place and time. On ‘Fingernail Moon’, choruses of layered, heavenly harmonies explore the sincere hope to “find a new language to use so we’re not confused”.

Going in a completely different direction, ‘Spoil on the Vine’ features chiming guitar under McHone’s distorted, echoing vocals, making the song’s sentiment feel more distanced and otherworldly, as she pleads: “won’t you cry into my ears so that I can hear your tears.”

Contrasting with the more elaborate constructions and layers elsewhere, three tracks deliberately pare everything down and take it back to basics. ‘End of the World’ has acoustic guitars noodling away under McHone’s doubled-up vocals. ‘Folk Song’ lives up to its name, with keening tune and folky delivery of lyrics including the world-weary observation that “all the sense in all this round world will never save me from myself.”

Taking this formula to the extreme, her apt closing number, ‘Tried’ is short, spare and stripped back to almost nothing, just vocals and simple guitar. Maybe McHone is asking the listeners to muse carefully about what they’ve heard when she finishes the entire record with the entreaty, “when you write it say that I tried.”

Stripped back or full-blown, there’s something for everyone who loves Americana here - McHone is really flexing her musical muscles. Very promising”.

An artist that you need to check out and add to your rotation, Carson McHone is an amazing talent. Go and follow her on social media and listen to Still Life. Although we are not that far into 2022, it is most certainly one of the best albums…