...They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.
-Frank O'Hara, "Digression on Number 1, 1948"
A. said once (after Steve Earle, in case anyone who googles it jumps my shit), "Todd May is the best songwriter in Columbus and I'd stand on Ron House's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say it." And, you know, while the soil here is rich with candidates - House and Jerry Decicca, Marcy Mays and Sue Harshe, Andy Robertson and Lara Yazvac, all five members of Moviola - I'm not sure I could name three songwriters who move me as consistently as May.
Morton Feldman once said of the poet Frank O'Hara that "Secreted in Frank O'Hara's thought is the possibility that we create only as dead men... Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence... Only the artist who is close to his own life gives us an art that is like death." (found on www.cnvill.net/mfmorgan.htm because I couldn't find my copy of Give My Regards to Eighth St) Frank O'Hara often makes me think of Todd May, or maybe that's the other way around. I've been knocked out by May's songs since I first heard them at 18 - and been knocked out every time, through The Lilybandits and The Plaster Saits and Mooncussers and Fort Shame and a handful of bands he didn't front but were graced with the honor of his guitar playing like Erika Carey and Lydia Loveless - and I've had the honor of calling him a friend for over a decade. But he's hit a new plateau with Rickenbacker Girls, the first record he's put out under his own name.
The title refers to an air base tucked into the south end of Columbus - more of a shell these days, transferred from Strategic Air Command to the National Guard in 1980, but once teeming with thousands of employees and their families - and this title, in conjunction with the airplane over the dark red image of Ohio on the cover speak to a gateway out and the longing of things missed. The songs bear this out - there's a duende soaking through everything here and there's an immense joy in living that doesn't happen without the other.
On "Why Don't You Come Around Lately", buoyed by some of the most subtle rhythm section swing from Steve and Pat McGann and the organ work of Greg Thurman, May addresses the what-ever-happened void in the pit of your stomach when people inevitably peel off from your field of vision, from your childhood, from your college town, singing "Saying that you died / Some Vegas suicide / Don't believe it's true / Nothing I expect from you" and going through "Miss a million, my dearest friend / I really want to see you again / Search the world from end to end" all tied together by the titular line as a hook, repeated and stuttered, lines drop off and the vocal swings back and forth from a croon to a snarl. That highlight's immediately followed by the parking lot dance of "Better Way to Build a Rocket" where the delivery is the kind of seduction that only comes out of truth and humility, a paean to growing up not knowing what the boundaries are wrapped around the image of building a model rocket and wondering what might happen if you never stopped - "Undertake / A glimmer in the radiation / Till the boosters go / Now I'm floating over / The old neighborhood" soars aloft on some of the best, purest guitar work on the record (I'm inclined to say Todd himself with Jamey Ball and Mark Spurgeon playhing those grimy soul chops underneath the solo).
These songs paint the picture of a hard-fought comfort, a joy in settling where you are but not ignoring the pleasure of the rest of the world. This comes clear with "Alphabet City" which rocks like early Steve Earle and the Dukes or the V-Roys or any classic of May's older band The Lilybands - "You're the kind of girl who rides on the hood / Of your cousin's black Camaro in the harvest parade / You're the queen of some vegetable / Bestowed / With a tiara and dress your Mama made" and winking "Nobody's gonna mistake you for Nico / Hell, no one is gonna mistake / Me for John Cale / You and I ain't built for that speed / Or that level of temptation / And that's just as well". And directly following "Alphabet City" is "Better Than You Ever Thought It'd Be" a whip-crack shuffle, sung with a deceptive ease, "Riding out by the station / Make a birthday with my friend / It's a long distance dedication / You're halfway through the end / You're getting old / You're getting old, my friend / Nothing up to now has ever turned out right / Still better than you ever thought it'd be", the specifics of the lyrics are as important but they're reinforced and undercut sometimes simultaneously, by repetition and stopping short, the song sounds like he's smiling all the way through it but with that look in his eyes that what he's saying is important whether you notice or not.
The title track of the record sums up the themes and is the best see-you-around song to come out of Columbus since Tim Easton's "All the Pretty Girls Leave Town" and Watershed's "Anniversary", with a catalogue of fading photographs held up to the older, shabby buildings of the air base - "She flew off to Califonia / Daddy was stationed at the AFB / Transfered out to some Spaniard's beach" or "Took the train out east to live with her Mom / And that sweet one / Was the same rule of thumb" all alternating with the chorus: "That night I did not go home / I drove down to the lock's / The tower splayed the light / Over an MP's watch / So clear, as the sea / Twilight shadow's mocking me".
I think I've given the impression that this is a lyrically focused record and while the lyrics are some of the best he's ever written, the production his voice, handled by Joe Viers who recorded the acclaimed Lydia Loveless record on Bloodshot, gets textures out of his voice that I heard in a million tiny bars here in Columbus but I'd never quite heard on a record before. And everything else, every instrumental voice and color, springs to three dimensional life and plays exactly the part it needs to. Not just the best singer-songwriter record I've heard all year, it's in the running for the soul record to beat. This is the kind of record that makes me pissed off I don't write more and makes me want to call a friend I hadn't seen in a while and say let's get some coffee, that makes me want to be more present in my life and reminds me to love the world more.
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