Herman Dune – Santa Cruz Gold
BB*Island – 21 January 2022
Released digitally-only back in 2018, following his split from his record label and a hiatus in touring, David Ivar’s 13th studio album now gets a belated incarnation on CD and vinyl for those who prefer to get physical. He plays pretty much everything with guest contributions here and there, from Caitlin Rose, Jolie Holland and War On Drugs’ Jon Natchez with Spencer Cullum Jr on steel and pedal steel and Mayon providing harmonies. It kicks off with the steady march beat toe-tapping shuffle of Life On The Run, Natchez on sax, a playful rumination about his lot as a musician (“I live the life of a raconteur/I play guitar and I go on tour/It doesn’t matter that I am poor/I’m a king man”) cursed/blessed with itchy feet (“I can’t settle down/I go crazy when I stay in town/I only come to life on the run/Get me on a train man/On a bus or on a plane man”) sprinkled with a kind of rebel fantasy (“They open my mail/They want my ass in jail …Fake IDs and real moustache/Marijuana from a private stash/I never get high but I will give it a try”) that peppers the lyrics with references to Philip Roth, Batman, Dylan, The Beatles and The Silver Jews along with the self-mocking “My friend Jeff Lewis says Songs About Songwriting Suck/So I won’t even mention the writer’s block”.
Restlessness and music, and his background as a Swedish-French immigrant, also underpin the pedal-steel coloured slow walking, dreamy A Good Man’s Got Nothing To Prove (“I gotta get my ass on the move/Riding in the sunset on a broken mule…Say another prayer try a different tune/And meet me at the end of the record groove”), the references this time being the Sour Patch Kids sweets, Castro and Jerry Seinfeld along with the unarguable observation that “Sweet pickles taste better with rouge”.
On a similar rhythm, sax resurfaces, and Rose adds her vocals his world-weary Jonathan Richman-like tones to Crazy Blue, essentially a song about being bruised and battered by life (“You never saw it coming but did it beat you/Punch you in the stomach to defeat you/Now your heart is bruising”), the title a reference to a men’s energy pill and, by extension, the medication to get through “a world that is painted Crazy Blue”. Ivar’s said he was in something of an existential crisis when writing the songs, wondering if there was actually an audience for his music. You can feel that in the downbeat shimmering waterfall acoustic notes of Lemon (“Sometimes you know what you’re here for/But mostly you just fake it/It hurts you more than it did before/‘Cause you were stronger and could fake it/Now you’d never expected/That your dreams would be shattered”), a despair that sees himself as “Just a wish on a twisted/Little note inside a wall”.
The mood swings between optimism and resignation, the first ushered in with the Texicali-flavoured All We Have Is Our Love (“I need you now I need you here/I hope that in a thousand years/Long after we disappear/They name a star for our love… This war won’t last forever/We’ll swim after the flood”), Dani Fine and Jordan Wainer providing crooning backing vocals on a song you could hear Willie Nelson singing. But that’s then offset by the cowboy prairie trot of She Ushered Me Back Into My Grave where the narrator’s neediness and depression prove too much for his alienated lover to bear (“I can’t be alone/It makes her feel like old people’s nurses/She gets really worked up/When I drink up her cup/She swears at my face and she curses…I fell back in her doubts/She ushered me back into my grave”).
The Latin-tinged instrumental sway Erotica provides a bridge into Undiscarded Jacaranda, another shuffling rhythm with a New York groove that, with a refrain sung in French, may find him beset by a Camus-like life is meaningless angst (“Don’t need a reason for staying in/Can’t pick up the phone anyway it’s not ringing/I might be missing out I might be shying/Might be scared of living/ I’m not scared of dying”) but then struck by the beauty of the titular flower.
Rose returns to add her voice to the infectious roots-country melody of Gatsbyfied on which, vocally reminiscent of Michael Nesmith, he unfolds a story-song which, variously speaking of the crime and insanity of the city, a fucked up and broken heart, and child abuse (“I was nine years old they locked me in the basement/I was scared I was cold for their twisted amusement”) is about finding a way (“My first mantra my first song my first ritual OCD”) to deal with the fear (“I found a little prayer I guess I made up my own/I said it over and over until I got in the zone/Where the darkness around ceased to terrify me”) and how “The sorrow and the scars and the blues we sing” are “all one and the same thing”.
That finding a way back into the light is at the heart of the penultimate fingerpicked, mountain-music gospel, I Found A New Me on which, Cullum’s pedal steel shining bright, Holland provides vocals and violin to counterpoint Ivar’s cracked and throaty vocals on a simple song, a sort of slowed down I Saw The Light, about the redemptive and transformative power of love as he sings “I used to laugh at people’s expense/Some say I was a bully, and I guess it’s true/I’d sneer and make faces whenever I’d get a chance/Now I found a new me when I found you”.
It ends sort of where it began with the echoey, semi-spoken and stripped back Man On The Road with its theme of a self-destructive restlessness embodied in:
I can never go home he says
‘Cause home is where it hurts
I once was and always will be alone he says
In the glittering dust
All my traveling
My unraveling
The scores I’ve had to keep on
Whose floors I got to sleep on
All the meandering
And the wandering
It made me what I am now
But, while the narrator may be alone and unanchored, with “a dreadful ghost in the backseat”, he remains unbowed (“He will stand tall/Stick to his opinions… He won’t look back”), “just a man on the road”. Warm, relaxed, bittersweet, sad and joyful in equal measure, recorded two years before 2020’s Notes From Vinegar Hill, it stands as an often thematic companion piece and its re-issue now as a physical entity (along with a limited-edition bonus Santa Cruz Gold Nuggets of 13 extra songs from the same period recorded in both San Pedro and Paris) is a very welcome addition to the library.
Order via Bandcamp: https://bbisland.bandcamp.com/album/santa-cruz-gold