Damien Jurado – What’s New, Tomboy?
Loose Music – 1 May 2020
There is a certain languid crunch about the drums and electric guitars that introduce Birds Tricked Into The Trees, the opening track from What’s New, Tomboy? The new album from Seattle-born singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is defined by a laid-back kind of determination. Music that knows where it wants to go, and how to get there, but isn’t averse to a bit of exploration along the way. It is the sound of an artist confident in his own ability, and in Jurado’s case is not misplaced, although it has been hard-earned.
This is the fifteenth studio album in a career that spans over a quarter of a century and is something of a small-scale departure from the stripped-back sound and soul-baring attitude of recent releases. Here his vocal delivery is forthright, his voice positioned prominently in the mix. But the ingredients that make him such a fascinating and accomplished songwriter are unchanging. There is the combination of adroit guitar work, melodic sensibility and confessional lyrics, which characterises the albums more tender moments, like the beautiful Ochoa. Few singers are able to crystalise longing and love like Jurado.
Songwriters are often seen as being the archivist’s of their own sorrows, and if this is the case with Jurado, he seems to have fallen into the role almost by accident. Often his songs deal with sadness without sounding sad. Sometimes it is the other way around. And sometimes, on songs like Alice Hyatt, there is a vague but somehow spine-tingling sense of melancholy that is both abstract and real. Jurado has the rare ability to carry the listener along on a mood, to change the air in a room: the rippling guitar and ghostly background sounds of Arthur Aware are a perfect example of this. He makes ostensibly simple songs sound fresh and strange.
The melody of Francine treads the borderland between newness and half-familiarity, while the hazy, fingerpicked Fool Maria hides some of Jurado’s finest lyrics. More than half of the songs on What’s New, Tomboy? have the names of people in their titles, and that’s no accident: this is a human album. An album about human emotions and webs of human interaction. And as such it has come at the perfect time: now more than ever we need reminding of the scope of loving relationships, friendships, the ability that people have to meet each other and lose each other. In this climate, a simple and intimate song like Sandra becomes even more poignant and even more vital.
Right now songs are acting as documents of possibility and aide-memoires of a time when we could connect with each other properly. Jurado is the perfect songwriter for this. He is wistful without ever wallowing in nostalgia, and he balances heartbreak with hope in a way that few artists can. From the subtle Hammond shimmer of its first track to the close-up chord changes and steady accumulation of lyrical detail of Frankie, the brilliant closer, What’s New, Tomboy? represents some of his finest work to date.
Photo Credit: Cary Norton