Slaid Cleaves
Together Through The Dark
Candy House Media
3 March 2023
Five years on from Ghosts On The Car Radio, the Austin-based singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves returns with another album. Together Through The Dark is his third with producer Scrappy Jud Newcombe that reinforces his status as one of Americana’s finest singer-songwriters on a collection of songs that speak of loss, longing, change and trying to make it through.
It opens with the (semi) title track, a co-write with childhood friend Rod Picott that, reminiscent of Bruce Cockburn, conjures a gathering apocalypse (“Rivers rising over old flood lines/Here come the prophets, calling out the end of times”) as “We nurse our bruises and we touch our scars/We look up to the night, seeing chaos in the star” set against a resolve to walk hand in hand as “We stray out into the dark, in search of one last chance” in a hard world where “You can’t pick up the rose without a handful of thorns/Holding on to the slimmest hope/You can beg for mercy or you can pray for a little more rope”.
An accomplished storyteller, he slips into first person mode for the mid-tempo Springsteenesque Puncher’s Song, as the reformed narrator’s rough and rowdy past pays an unexpected visit (“I stepped out into the night/When I heard a voice call out my name/From under the streetlamp light/I knew him from my bar room days”) as the old man gets to reminiscing about “those wild, wild nights” and “the headaches and the handcuffs” when he “could never pass up defending/The honor of a working girl/From some tanked up low life poser/Tryin’ to take her for a twirl/Or schoolin’ some low down rounder/For dealin’ that bottom card”. There’s a regret at how those glory days are behind him, even if the stories “are mostly lies” and a welcome acknowledgement that “these days I remember where I was last night”, a raging against the dying of the light (“sometimes, I still think that I could win one last bar fight”) tempered with the physical reality that “with a crooked nose and a battered jaw and a shoulder that never healed right/Maybe in the end, I guess it’s best, I’ve had my last bar fight”.
That notion of facing mortality continues in the uptempo, driving tribal, bluesy rhythm of Next Heartbreak (“I saw it comin’ but it came down hard as a stone/Laid my brother down in his grave/We had one last whiskey over his bones/He was a fighter but he knew he was facing the end/Hope I’m as brave when it comes my time/And we’re gathered round the bedside again”), a song about essentially knowing the limits of what a soul can endure and living with that (“You chop wood, carry water, should be simple enough/Till you’re down on your knees, looking up/At the sky with a fear that you’re not that tough…Now I know how much a heart can take/I count my blessings and I carry on”).
The impact of globalisation on small town underpins the wistful, strummed At Christmastime (“was a time, when factories hummed/Enough for everyone/We didn’t notice what we had …We all pinned our hopes upon/The politician’s song/But all is silent in the empty union hall”) as employment choices become more limited (“Sister married, moved out west./Took the civil service test/Delivers bills and junk mail/On the streets of the big city now/Younger brother joined the Corps/And on deployment number four/Took some shrapnel in his knee/And puts up with the pain somehow”), the narrator the only one left behind with the ghosts (“This old house is all that’s left/A family once so blessed/The memories echo off the walls at Christmastime”).
The musical framework shifts to a worksong blues rhythm with Double Shift Tuesday, a co-write with Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines about wondering how you ended up stuck in the rut that’s now your life, call and response refrain “How’d you end up here” punctuating a litany of failure (“I’m treadmill running on a wheel in a cage… You work all night till you stop feelin’ human …rolling up nickels and dimes/For a meal and a bottle of beer… I blend right in with the trash and graffiti”), the declaration that “Someday everybody gonna know my name” ringing decidedly hollow.
Taking on a swaggering Stonesy riff by way of The Velvets and a reference to Born To Run, Second Hand is a wistful look at coming to terms with your failures, disappointments and how things didn’t turn out like you thought they would (“In a dusty old church basement/My daddy lit his second cigarette/Spoke of all the years he wasted/Letting go of all those old regrets/And as I watch my own smoke settle/It’s not too hard to understand/That so much of who I am today/Well, I just picked up second hand … Guess I didn’t really have the goods/Now I’m rolling over one more payday loan”) and of settling for, at the most, second best (“I know I’m not the one she fell for/She smiles but I can see it in her eyes/And when she stares into the distance/I know there’s only so much she can hide”) and like your battered jalopy, you’re “Just held together with spare parts and duct tape till you’re done”.
Another of the many standouts, Arnold Nash is the true story about “a good prisoner, a bad citizen/A terrible family man” from Bangor, Maine, who lived “Half his life in prison/The other half on the run”, the song unfolding as the fictionalised narrator’s tale of his grade school buddy (“He’d come to the house and play/No one knows what set him on his path/Some would say a broken home/Can turn a good kid bad/Some insist he was never more than trash”) recalling how back in 81 he was aiming to follow in his sheriff father’s footsteps while Arnold “was starting up his own career/He’d work twice as hard at stealing/Than he would at an honest job”. Escaping prison three times, he was eventually convicted of murdering his neighbour and “spent a quarter century inside” before getting an early release for good behaviour, though, as his old friend recalls, with no place else to go, he’d always find a way to wind back up back inside (“Sure enough, when he got hungry/He come out of the shady woods/Walked right up to the blue state trooper’s car…He saw comfort in that cruiser/Saw three squares and a bed”).
Another (this time fictionalised) narrative, the chiming chords and jogging rhythm of Put The Shovel Down sketches a Blanco County troubled soul who “couldn’t get out of his own way/A chip upon his shoulder/Quick to lose control/Diggin’ himself deeper every day …Losing friends and family/Stumbling along/Kicked out of every drinking hole in town”, serving up the message that “If you want to get out of the hole you’re in/The first thing you gotta do is put the shovel down”, turning it back on the narrator who’s learnt to do just that.
Getting swampy, Tequila Chili Queen spins another story, this one about Sandy, a Southern girl who “worked in Dallas in an office in the sky/Chattin’ up the oil men, her hair piled high/Bought designer clothes at the Galleria Mall/Dancin’ in Deep Ellum, she was fairest of them all” who, after series of disappointments in love (“The husbands and the houses, they’d come and then they’d go/And when the dust would settle, she’d be right back on her own”) decides to chuck it all and “After twenty-too many years chasing wedding rings/She traded in her Lexus, sold off all her things” and “headed west on 20 with a chili recipe/On the dash a pack of Salems and a half a pint of gin”, ends up in Agua Fria, New Mexico, wins the chilli cook-off and, here for a good time, not a long time, heads off into the desert with some river rat “in search of mescaline”.
A second Picott co-write, the sparse and simply fingerpicked Sparrow is a quietly sad, mutedly sung song about a widower, loss and grief (“He brings a faded pillow/To his face/A hint of her perfume/Haunting the room/Hiding in the shadows of this place”) as he remembers back to that first meeting when “Tenement concrete steps/Pretty, young and pale/A cigarette on her lips/Leaning on the rail/He pulled up in his car/Asking her name/A thrill, that her heart could not contain” and of the years together in “A life that started hard/Turned soft with age”, drawing to a close with the moving image of “Bobbins and pins/Needle and thread/The quilt that she made/For their wedding bed/Chisel and saw/Hammer and plane/The pine box and a cross/Where he carved her name”.
In contrast, Nature’s Darker Laws has a more ominous musical and lyrical edge as he turns the lens on the trauma that’s beset contemporary America in the wake of economic and social divisions (“See the man, from humble home he goes to work each day/Until he’s told a stranger soon will take his job away/The sun goes down, and in his heart a quiet anger gnaws/In his veins there runs the quickened blood of nature’s darker laws”), the lyrics clearly alluding to Trump in “when he hears the demagogue, the rapturous applause/He’s found the voice that fills the emptiness with nature’s darker laws”, and, fed by the media (“On every screen the fear and blame is all that he can see/The nightly news, it shows him how to see his enemy /The radio, it feeds the lies the grievances “) with violence the inevitable outcome (“He holds a gun and feels he’s in control for the first time/His captain yells that fighting for your country is no crime/He joins the crowd and holds a flag that stands for what once was/In violence he’s found a brotherhood through nature’s darker laws”).
It comes to a close, though, on an upbeat, optimistic note with the third Picott collaboration, Make Your Own Light, about the quest for inspiration (“You won’t find it in a bottle/It’s as quiet as a prayer/It’s quicker than rain, thinner than air/You can’t ask it of another/It’s more valuable than gold/Ever out of reach/A mystery to behold”), and how, ultimately, it has to come from within. Twelve albums and 33 years down the line from his first, Slaid Cleaves’ light is incandescent.