The living room, studio and stage doors have been open to artists including Edith Frost, the Silos’ Walter Salas-Humara, Come’s Chris Brokaw, Six Finger Satellite’s James Apt, members of the Walkabouts, and Slow River boss George Howard. Those gathered to add guitar, bass, mandolin, drums and vocal harmonies aren’t told what to play. Fisher says simply: “They’re playing with us because we trust them.”
“Paul and I talk about this pretty often. The music we do — it’s not like anyone sat down and said, ‘Gee, we’re gonna make acoustic music with electric instruments and acoustic instruments. It’s what we do, it’s what we hear in our heads. We’d be sitting around the house playing music with each other whether we were putting out records or not. I hope there’s an honesty in what we do that resonates, because I try to be as direct and honest as I can be within the music. I’m not a clever writer, and I’m not interested in being a clever writer. I’m much more interested in getting to whatever that truth is, the truth of the moment.
“I think all the people that play with us are of a same mind. And that’s a really special thing. Earlier you asked about what to call it, and I said it’s just a band with 26 people in a band. But it feels that way. Regardless of who it is that’s playing with us, everybody sort of has the same aesthetic that guides them, and it’s remarkable that we’ve found as many people to play with and such talented people. I imagine it feels the same way for Howe Gelb or Joey [Burns] and all the people they play with [in Giant Sand’s extended family].
“It’s an infinite sort of variety. It never gets boring. Every night somebody plays something they didn’t play before. We just did 53 shows and every single night, someone would do something and I’d look over with this big smile on my face — ‘I never heard that before. That was cool!'”
Everything’s Fine captures this spirit remarkably. Fisher half laughs, half whispers that in Europe, not only is the new album getting airplay on BBC One during the daytime, but people are remarking that the record sounds “sunnier” than listeners have come to expect. As a surprising byproduct of carefully planned detailing, WGC has made their most accessible recording to date.
In addition to being purposefully shorter than the other records, the actual making of the record turned the band’s previous process ass over tea kettle. The basic tracks were recorded with Peter Linnane on grand piano, the Walkabouts’ Terri Moeller on drums, and Pete Sutton on bass guitar. Within a two-week period, Howard, Brokaw, Apt, Vic Rawlings, David Michael Curry and Pete Weiss added their parts. Frost, reprising her role on Mojave, and the Walkabouts’ Carla Torgerson contributed harmony vocals. Fisher’s vocals, taking a strikingly different emotional and character posture for each song, were recorded in a single day.
The songs, which shine, chime, bespeak specific locale — with titles such as “Christmas In Nevada”, “Southend Of A Northbound Train”, and “Massachusetts” — hold the lives of drunks whose thirsts can not be slaked, lovers separated by distance or death, and ruminative foul weather shut-ins making home from the scraps of a life left behind. As I unpack and play records and wait for my paper-whites to bloom, I hear Everything’s Fine as wintry, wandering and strangely affirming.
When asked if the winter theme is purposeful, Fisher laughs, initially saying, “No!” He continues: “No one’s said that to me yet. Maybe it’s the time of year. It was written during the winter. So you may have something there.”
I relate that I’ve been playing “The Beautiful Song” and “Massachusetts” repeatedly in the days before this conversation. Dancing with propulsive guitar and drums, Fisher’s vocals on the former take on an aggressive urgency that is powerful and sexy and confident: “Even an avalanche can’t keep me down.” The latter contains the aforementioned lyric regarding salvation. I’ve been traveling for a few months after a personally tumultuous year before settling here in Tennessee, and I have found these particular songs, respectively, an inspiration and a great comfort during the transition. Fisher perks to attention.
“Well, it’s funny that ‘Massachusetts’ is resonating with you during this particular time for you, because that’s exactly the time that it was when I wrote it. I had just moved into this apartment and it was snowy, and all of those things.”
None of which is surprising. Everything’s Fine, in fact, sounds a bit like home. The kind of home one makes in oneself. And, relatively speaking, everything is fine.
Within days, those paper-whites will bloom, symbolizing consolation and promise. And that is what Everything’s Fine sounds like: consolation and promise.
Paige La Grone currently lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee, where present obsessions include lengthening daylight hours, Southern folklore, the last two Talk Talk recordings, and as ever, road trips and really good coffee.
