Based in Juneau, Alaska, Josh Fortenbery’s debut album, No Such Thing As Forever, reveals a drawl well suited to his retro-styled mix of folk, country and bluegrass. Anxieties, ennui, and feeling trapped and helpless all fuel his songs, opening with the strummed Prine-tinged Bitter, the first lines of which pretty much sums it all up in “the kid is drowning in work that he didn’t choose to do/And he knows he should be saving something but he can’t remember what, or who” with bourbon unable to provide the fix. It’s a downbeat state of mind in a world where “there’s been no word from God for centuries”, but Fortenbery’s actual message is about not heeding the doomsayers (“If you believe what you read online you’re gonna die bitter”) and to remember, in a good way, that “there’s no such thing as forever”.
Even so, it doesn’t much buck up with the nimbly fingerpicked and dobro-coloured rag of Siblings (“You don’t have to earn the right to cry/Misery’s no competition you could ever win but still you try/Anything is overwhelming when everyone expects you to be fine/I understand the way you spend your time/And we both take to drinking when the world is closing in on every side/It’s cheaper than a therapist, don’t keep you in the house like getting high”), but behind that there’s a resolute and supportive brotherly love for his sister (“I’ve loved you long as you have been alive/I’ve carried you too young to walk/I’ve carried you too drunk to talk/We’ve danced and fought and told the truth and lied/You thought me better than I was and sometimes I pretended you were right”) that chimes with the general half full/half empty approach.
Fiddle led old time backwoods folk, Bored To Death pretty much sums itself up with its self-defeating approach to life (“I’m looking for joy, but I get distracted/I plan on truth but can’t help acting…I cry for the sun on days when it rains/but when it comes I look for shade/If this wedding’s dry it’ll be one to forget/I’m here for you, but I’m bored to death”). There’s more fingerpicked ragtime blues on Honey, which manages to touch on regret, love, loss, friendship and alcoholism (“Every room like an exhibit with nothing off limits except the hidden booze”) in just a few lines, and ends up on a note of survival admiration (“A casual icon, a fine-tuned Nikon, could hope to be half as tough”). Another uptempo bluegrassy fiddle number, Sewing The Same Seams is another skewed love song (“Hope I don’t outlive every relationship/But if that proves too hard to do, hope my last is you”) about spending 30 years “searching for something I’d already found”.
It’s not hard to trace the end of the trail metaphor in the simple dobro and fiddle acoustic New Fallen Snow (“All my tracks are covered by new fallen snow/there’s no trace of where I have been/I have turned my back on the snow and the cold/And I won’t be back again my friend… Take the saddle off my pony, take the bridle from my mare/Turn her loose way out in green pastures where the grass grows tall and fair”) with its backwoods spiritual feel.
Opening the second half on a doomy bass note and dark strings backing, he turns the lens inward for the self-critical Heirlooms (“I’ve got this temper/It was my grandfather’s, then my father’s, now it’s mine/And it sits ‘tween the joy and the silence/This little spark of violence caused a century of crying/And it’s easier to blame everyone who gave me my name than admit I could change if I wanted”) and how “We all learn from our kin how to love and how to sin and become the same men we once run from”.
He returns to the never satisfied theme for the gravelly sung Nepotism (“When I have nothing to do I get depressed, I have too much to do I’m anxious/But sitting still is all I’ve done where I’m certain that the outcome will get worse the longer I try”) with its bemoaning of everything that comes with growing old (“Can’t keep aging without taking something to help me keep my figure, to help me go to sleep, to wake me up in the morning, calm me down after noon, make me smile in the evening and remember to repeat and repeat… It’s getting harder to choose a pair of shoes, don’t want to bend to tie the laces”), the grumpy old man syndrome (“Not growing wiser I’m growing impatient/Pass on the right and I still get brain freeze/I’ll admit it’s my birthday if you promise not to sing”), with the title getting a wry twist in “You know I didn’t do a thing to earn these years, was my parents that put me here”. Indeed, he has an adept way of putting a spin on well-worn country clichés, such as the tried and trusted honky tonk beers and tears staple (“I’m looking for mercy in a pint glass/ I’ve been asking the mirror for change/I’m thinking that you might like to go/And I’m wondering who might ever stay”) of the Frizell/Jones-styled old time barroom waltzer After Last Call that gets some clever wordplay with “After last call I need another/And think every mended heart deserves a break”.
Broken and busted relationships (and similar word dances) also underpin the bustlingly picked As One Does (“There’s nothing left you must be right/I’m always turning off the lights/We can’t talk if I can’t see”) along the resignation that life is just a long disappointment (“Don’t you fixate on disaster like I do?…there’s nothing you can think of that’ll change the final outcome…Can’t admit the things I think are really what I thought/Grow apart from the ideas that made me comfortable/Understand life is linear and we’re all fallible/Start to thinking there’s nothing deep inside/The way I am is all there is unless I dream at night”).
And as he finds the deck stacked in favour of nihilism, it heads to the end appropriately enough with another sack of self-castigation on Nothing (“I forgot to call you back, my everlasting shame/I was focused on myself so I rarely spoke your name…Now the whole world’s made of nothing/‘Cause there’s nothing I can say, nothing I can do, nothing I believe, and nothing left for you”), another song that finds itself bereft of faith with the light going out (“Mine was the last voice you heard, and I hope you understood when I said “thank you, I’ll miss you, it’s alright, we’ll be good, I know you did all that you could”/And then the whole world turned to nothing”). And so, turning to Texicana tones, it ends fittingly with him facing Another Existential Crisis as the years take their silent toll (“If every day I’m someone else, I haven’t noticed it myself/Haven’t changed, at least as far as I can tell/And I wonder who I was, wonder who I will become”) and we eventually become part of the fabric (“We all live, like we’re infinite/And I guess, in some ways, that’s correct/‘Cause in several hundred years, when we’re not here, all our molecules are gonna be reused”). Deceptively philosophical and sneaking shafts of light between the curtains of darkness, there may be no such thing as forever, but for now, this album promises Josh Fortenbery a bright future.
Bandcamp: https://joshfortenbery.bandcamp.com/album/no-such-thing-as-forever