Eliza Gilkyson – 2020
Red House Records – Out Now
Presciently titled, produced by her son, Cisco Ryder, who also plays the drums, and recorded in Austin, Gilkyson has described how the songs on 2020 were “born out of a visceral impulse to promote unity, commitment and action during this epic and critical showdown of power versus people in the USA and our world today”. It is a collection of songs that serve both as a call to arms and a reminder of the beauty and decency that still exists.
The first track on the album was the last to be written, the simple acoustic Promises To Keep, the title an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem about isolation and responsibilities, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, referencing the line about “miles to go before I sleep” which here serves as a rallying cry to action to change a world turned dark because wishing and hoping simply aren’t enough and “thoughts and prayers will never make things right”. Rather, she’s “been counting on my angel choir/To put some wings upon my feet/Fill me up with inspiration’s fire/And get me out into the street” and let the fire of love burn down the barricades.
Things take on a funky blues groove for Peace In Our Hearts, a swaggering gospel-infused number that calls Odetta to mind as it calls on all sisters and brothers to walk together “with every color and tribe”, “stare into the face of the hateful mind with peace in our hearts” and carry “love in our hearts”.
In contrast, My Heart Aches carries its message with just a simple strum, the song a co-write with Tim Goodwin, a student at one of her songwriting workshops who brought along the refrain, that looks back over the path of musical protest, “stepping over bodies of other mothers’ sons”, “from a Mississippi bridge to the Ferguson trial” as it references such iconic songs of freedom phrases as “we shall overcome”, “give peace a chance” and “hammer out justice” while recounting the victims, “the children locked in cages far away where no one sees”, “the helpless and the hopeless”, “the homeless refugees”, “the voices who’ve been silenced at the mercy of our greed”, “the prisoners of conscience who speak out for those in need” and the victims of hatred and prejudice left “lying on the ground/In the churches and the schoolyards/From the shots that took them down”. Again, it serves reminder not to rest in complacent and that, there are still miles to go before we can sleep safely.
A posthumous collaboration with Woody Guthrie, Beach Haven, a particularly catchy number with a swaying honky-tonk feel, brushed drums and pedal steel, the chorus taken verbatim from a letter written by Guthrie in 1952 to the landlord of Beach Haven Apartments in New Jersey, one Fred Trump (father to Donald), concerning his racist, segregationist renter policies. Guthrie inviting him to “open your doors”, “tear down these race hate blocks” and “rip out this strangling red tape” and make the place an inclusive community. Needless to say, it fell on deaf ears, the most recent census, in 2010, showing the area to still be over 98% white. On a tangential but connected note, I do recommend you check out The Banker, a film starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L Jackson about two real-life black real estate entrepreneurs who, through their white frontman, bought two banks in Texas so they could give mortgages and loans to black residents.
Guthrie’s not the only protest voice who informs the album. With a slight gender-neutral lyric change, she covers both Pete Seeger’s anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone, singing in a hushed voice over an arrangement that expands from acoustic guitar to take in in drums, plucked mandolin and keening pedal steel, and a six-minute plus reading of Dylan’s equally still resonant A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, here taken at a slow martial beat with Jaimee Harris adding vocal back up.
Returning to the self-penned material, One More Day, featuring Mike Hardwick on dobro, is a simple almost lullabying plea to the world, “weary … worn and tired/From all the pleasures we required” for the human race to be given another chance to “get it right” and “learn to love again”. It’s followed in turn by another bluesy lope, the slinkily sung Sooner Or Later a song about inequality and segregation that warns those at the top of the tree who “give us just enough water, just enough wine/Just enough crumbs, a dollar and a dime/Just enough hope to keep us towin’ the line”, with “the dark ones relegated to the bottom of the bin/And woman was created to put out and to give in”, that the tables will turn and the oppressed are “Gonna rise up, gonna take it all back”.
However, despite the picture she paints of tyranny, hatred, division and despair, calling on resistance, rebellion and revolution to put out the fires that are burning us, ultimately the album ends with a reminder of hope and beauty, the latter pointedly so in the old-time fiddle and mandolin hymnal waltzing Beautiful World of Mine, a love letter to the planet with its mountains, the unfolding seasons, the “fragrance of sagebrush and pine” and the bounty it has to offer and a pledge handle it with care and tend to its needs.
Finally, she ends with another songwriter student co-write, Robert McPeek providing the chorus of We Are Not Alone, a simple reminder of unity in what can often seem a divisive world, flickering flames seeking each other in the dark, nodding to the Gospel of St Matthew in the line “where two or more are gathered/We raise our voices to the sky”, not lone souls howling into the night but a “family/Knowing all the love we need is standing by…conjuring our forces/And coming face to face with every fear”.
Fuelled by resonant songs that are both about and for the world today, this is an album of the year in more than just its title.
Eliza Gilkyson recently recorded an at-home-session for Folk Radio UK which you can watch here.
Order 2020 it here https://RedHouseRecords.lnk.to/eliza2020
Go to http://elizagilkyson.com for updates.
Photo Credit: Jeff-Fasano