#573 The Best Album of 2001, Round 4 Match #114: Gillian Welch vs. Spoon
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:
#8 Gillian Welch, TIME (THE REVELATOR)
vs.
#9 Spoon, GIRLS CAN TELL
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [[email protected]] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have four Designated Cheerleaders today, but they are not evenly distributed! We’ve got 3 DCs for TIME (THE REVELATOR), and I’m publishing all of them since there’s the possibility that this is the last time we’ll see this album in the tournament. (How much of a possibility? No idea.) Also, if you’re reading this in your email client, today’s newsletter is really big. Apologies!
So, first up, for TIME (THE REVELATOR), it’s @aarcraft.bsky.social. Take it away, Aaron!
You can get lost in Time (The Revelator). The tight harmonies of Gillian Welch and her long time partner David Rawlings have a haunting quality even when they aren't singing of Ruination Day, the fateful day when the Iceberg hit, the Okies fled, the Great Emancipator took a bullet in the back of the head and a punk band played a two dollar show where they won't even make enough for a half tank of gas. Death hovers over this album - Ruination Day, thinking about Elvis and John Henry on the day they died, getting a Red Clay Halo in the afterlife. In perhaps the best song on the album (although it's a tough competition), the death might be of her industry because "Everything is Free" now. But she is going to do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay. Time (The Revelator) always moves on. They clean up after the two dollar show and she knows she wants to sing in a rock n roll band despite it all.
The nearly 15 minute closer "I Dream a Highway" brings this all to a head. There doesn't seem to be a way out - it's wheels inside of wheels and a call within a call - but she dreams a highway back to you over and over until you're free. I return to this song a lot - despite its length because it's a song (and album) I love getting lost in.
Thank you, Aaron!
Next up, for TIME (THE REVELATOR), it’s @bermanmatt.bsky.social. Take it away, Matt!
The first thing you notice about Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)" is the cover: All rich red-white-and-blues, a beat-up couch, a wood-paneled room straight out of the '70s, and Gillian Welch herself looking just off at something. It's a striking image, made more so in contrast with the covers of Gillian Welch's first two albums - 1996's "Revival" and 1998's "Hell Among the Yearlings" - each of which present her in a cold, Depression-era black-and-white.
You could be forgiven for thinking that color photo promised a half-century leap forward or lush expansion of Gillian Welch's stark, signature Appalachian sound. Instead, "Time (The Revelator)" goes the other direction, stripping back further to present a crisper view. This is not a faded image of the deep past - this is a past within her lived in memory, but also just as much an image of the now. And that color scheme does not lie, for this is an album of American music. Not just Americana, but songs about America: John Henry and Elvis, the Titanic and Lincoln, straight jobs and road trips, Steve Miller and an artist's struggles to survive.
The songs play as a series of spare duets, Gillian's wavering-but-ethereal voice floating upon crystalline guitar lines from her eternal partner Dave Rawlings. Most songs are two guitars, two voices, unless they drop down to one guitar and Gillian's voice alone. These are songs about saviors and America delivered with pure, simple harmony, like you'd see them do in person ("I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll" is actually lifted from a live performance at Nashville's Ryman theater). If anything, musically it's even more of a throwback to what was an already uniquely backwards-looking sound. Gospel, country, finger-picking mountain music. But lyrically not everything looks so far back - there are nods to Taj Mahal and shout outs to wanting to "sing that rock and roll."
And this is key. Where Gillian's first two albums felt like they channeled moments from the past, this one feels distinctly present - albeit a present rumination on past things, an exploration of how everything that came before has made now exactly what it is. Songs return to the theme of time as a revelator - a word repurposed here from its religious roots to mean the need for time to evaluate the worth or meaning of anything. And where before Gillian often sang as characters or folkloric story songs, here she sings mostly of herself. On the title track, Gillian sings of accusations of herself as a pretender and an imitator - an obvious nod to criticism of her for mining the sound of a dust-bowl past or playing at a character. Only time, she seems to say, will demonstrate the truth and value of the music she has created and must continue to create. "My First Lover" brings the theme of the evaluatory distance of time into even clearer view, the song less about her lover than about her inability to remember that much about him - "he gets a little hazy when I think of him now" - but she remembers the freedom of moving on and how it defined herself to herself, a "quicksilver girl," who was "not waiting for a white wedding gown."
Elsewhere, Gillian sings directly of her need to make music and put her art into a world that doesn't value it. She sings of a "fortune lady" walking beside her - whether a literal fortune teller or a promise of fortune, time still slowly revealing the falsity of her words. On "Red Clay Lover," she wonders if she will receive her gold gown when she gets to the pearly gates, but accepts that she will take "the red clay robe with the red clay wings and a red clay halo for my head." Or take "Everything is Free Now" and its far-too-prescient line about making art and who gets paid for it: "They figured it out; that we're gonna do it anyway; even if it doesn't pay."
And always there are songs of love: earthly love, godly love, the love of making music. She is always longing for "somebody who is waiting for me."
These are not songs likely to hit you on first listen. Gillian Welch builds a world that you have to slow down and sink into. But if you let yourself take that time, the timelessness of her sound can cast a spell. Two guitars, two voices, time stretching out ahead and behind you, all coming together to reveal something more, even if it is almost certainly forgotten again.
On "I Dream a Highway," Gillian sings:
"What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you."Is she singing of a lover? Of the music? Of God? Probably a little bit of all of it. There's a lot to unpack. Give this album your time and maybe it will reveal itself to you.
Thank you, Matt!
Finally, last but not least, for TIME (THE REVELATOR), it’s @locraen.bsky.social. Take it away, argle-bargle!
I’m fairly certain it was one of the two, but I can’t recall if it was Bella2 or Kitchen Compatriot Jones who introduced me to the music of Gillian Welch. Well, re-introduced, perhaps more accurately. O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its omnipresent soundtrack had, of course, introduced the whole world to Ms. Welch a year before, at least for those of us who weren’t already privy to her dark and introspective Americana. But I confess that I didn’t really pay her much mind until around the time I started hooking up with Bella2.
Back then I was slaving away in a restaurant kitchen. Every kitchen is subject to its own unique rhythms, but in that kitchen, at least if Kitchen Compatriot Jones and I were around, the mornings were for alt-country. So, while “the cooks cleaned the kitchen / with the staggers and the jags,” the little CD boombox blasted the Flatlanders, Emmylou, Steve Earle, Neko, and of course, Gillian and her longtime partner and collaborator David Rawlings, who does yeoman’s work on guitar while stoically concealing himself behind Gillian’s moniker.
Kitchen Compatriot Jones had about a decade on me, and the age discrepancy, coupled with the geography of his Los Angeles and my upper Great Plains, resulted in wildly different exposures to specific artists. The Internet was still in its adolescence, after all; distance still mattered. So even though we had very similar tastes and appreciated a wide range of genres, there were confounding gaps in the musical artists that each of us knew, and we delighted in the fact that we were able to expose each other to so much new music. He singlehandedly filled in a massive hole in my musical knowledge, and hopefully I did even a fraction of the same for him. In any event, whether it was he or Bella2 who re-introduced me to Gillian, every one of her first three albums was in heavy rotation and blasting over the drone of the exhaust fans on those busy, knifework mornings. Time (The Revelator) was almost certainly the heaviest, on account of it being one of the most recently released…but also because of Bella2.
Yes, there was a Bella1. She was my high school sweetheart and my first love. She was and remains cool as shit. We still occasionally check in, as we did last year when a dear mutual friend was in trouble (likely the same friend who introduced us, to be honest). She’s married to a rad Garth, raising kids, and being crafty. I’m happy for her; though, she doesn’t really have anything to do with this…hype essay? We’ve gone a bit off course. I just thought you should know about her for context, I guess.
Bella2, however, has everything to do with this DC. She was the only person who ever straight-up ripped my heart out of my chest and grinned while she squeezed it, Temple of Doom-style. Though to be fair, she dumped me over the phone, so whether she was grinning is speculative. We didn’t date long—just a few months—but I fell hard. She was from Great Falls—where my grandparents had lived for a time—and there was something enigmatic about that. It felt like a little western town in the sky. Like, she was this hot barista rocker girl who descended from the Rockies and introduced me to so much great country music. Look, I was smitten, OK? She was smart and sardonic and irreverent, and we would spend nights drinking and chain-smoking on the roof of a building across the street from her four-plex, which overlooked downtown Portland across the river. We once watched a double-feature of movies that were filmed in our hometowns: Fargo for me, and for her The Slaughter Rule, a grim indie movie starring an embryonic Ryan Gosling. [I should note, also, that The Slaughter Rule had a criminally underrated soundtrack with a score composed by Jay Farrar that also included great tracks from Vic Chestnut and Neko Case (whose music I know for certain Bella 2 introduced me to), among many others. I will absolutely nominate it for the Best Album of 2002 Bracket, if and when the time comes.] Not long after, Bella2 flew back to Great Falls for a few days. She dumped me over the phone the night she returned to Portland. “I quit smoking cigarettes,” was one of the last things she said to me, as if I cared.
To me, Time (The Revelator) will always be a breakup album. I know that it mostly isn’t. Not really. It’s about a lot of things: folklore and myth, ruination, death, time and revelations (duh). And it illustrates those motifs through repeating characters and events: Casey Jones, April 14, Elvis Presley, John Henry, the jags, the Titanic, Abe Lincoln. Did you know that the Titanic hit the iceberg and Honest Abe was shot and a hard luck band made a pittance on a poorly attended show, all on April 14? I didn’t, until I first heard “April the 14th Part 1,” and the pseudo-reprise “Ruination Day, Part 2.” The former is the strongest song on an album chock full of outstanding songs. The latter is the weakest, and the only one that might be deemed unnecessary. Surrounding them is banger after banger, from the titular tone poem “Revelator,” to the raucous and chuckle-inducing “Red Clay Halo,” to the somber and reflective “Elvis Presley Blues,” all reverently set to sparse acoustic guitars, with the occasional banjo plucked for color.
And then there’s the 15-minute-long “I Dream a Highway,” the closer, which comprises more than a quarter of the album’s run time. In a vague approximation of Dylan’s closer on Highway 61 Revisited, “I Dream a Highway” ticks off every theme that Gillian was reaching for across Time (The Revelator) while also being, at least to me, a breakup song. Folklore and myth? Ruination? Death and time? Revelations? Yes, these are the things one contemplates after having their heart ripped out. And as Roy Orbison taught us, only in dreams can you return to a love lost.
A couple of years later I was at a wedding at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains, about an hour south of Missoula. There I met a close friend of the bride, who mentioned that he was originally from Great Falls. I told him that I had dated a girl from there once and dropped Bella2’s name. “Oh my god, I went to high school with her!” he said. Then he made a sour face. “Ugkh, she was one of The Plastics.”
She had definitely grinned like the guy in Temple of Doom.
When I sat down to write this DC, I started to think about the timeline of when we were a couple, in early 2023. We would have met in January, I think. She definitely ended it in April. Was that break up call on April 14—on Ruination Day? Very possibly! Perhaps that’s why I relied so heavily on this album to get me over that heartbreak hump. It wasn’t the only album that fit that bill, but it was one of the few I distinctly recall listening to most.
I am happy to report that I climbed that hump pretty quickly, thanks in no small part to Gillian, and I ended up meeting my wife later that same year, in the very restaurant where I had been blasting alt- country in the mornings. KC Jones was there when we met. He officiated our wedding.
To be honest, I haven’t listened to a ton of Gillian Welch since the mid-aughts. But I’ll throw one of her albums on every now and again, and I’m always glad that I did. Revival is still, probably, objectively, the best. But Time (The Revelator) is the most personal, and it’s still the one that gets the most rotations. It’s a fucking outstanding album. If you got me drunk enough on the right night, on a roof overlooking downtown, I might even declare it the best of 2021.
Thank you, argle-bargle!
Then! For GIRLS CAN TELL, it’s @levin.bsky.social. Take it away, Elana! (You can find the original post here.)
Girls Can Tell is a perfect album. It was a comeback album from a band I did not care about till they came back. After two disappointing 90s albums their label dropped them. They went on hiatus and somewhere in there Britt Daniel studied The Kinks and Elvis Costello and became a first-rate songwriter.
Daniel’s got an instantly recognizable rock and roll voice. He emotes like a champ. He’s got throaty raspyness with an underlying sweetness. He makes interesting choices in his vocal melodies and line delivery. He can Beatles when he wants to–John Lennon specifically.
Spoon aren’t full on retro time travelers like The Lilys or Apples in Stereo (bands I also love). This may be why Spoon are more popular. Yet I often find other bands that aim to modernize 60s & 70s sounds end up with bland results or incorporate only the aspects of contemporary music I don’t like. Spoon perfects the balance.
Spoon was co-founded by drummer Jim Eno. Spoon sounds like a band co-founded by a drummer. The piano? Percussive. Vibraphone going bing bong? Percussive. Daniel’s vocals on songs like “Believing Is Art” are EXTREMELY percussive. Loads of syncopation. Apparently they are fellow fans of Jamaican Ska.
There’s a lot going into these songs: yes Power Pop but also a Steely Dan chord here, a Duane Eddy guitar there. A Marquis Moon bass moment. And bless them for having vocal harmonies even if it’s just Daniel multitracked.
Everything Hits at Once is an all time great breakup song. The lyrics have the broadly relatable feelings that will connect with anyone who’s ever fallen out of love. At the same time, the lyrics have a specificity in their vacillation between confidence and doubt that make it vulnerable and interesting.
That song’s rhythm creeps up on you. Try singing the word “sneak” along with those little lightly played keyboard chords.
How was Me and the Bean not a single?! (Probably because it is a cover)
Lines in the Suit is my favorite Elvis Costello song of 2001.
The Fitted Shirt borrows Kashmir’s groove, but its about the challenge of finding slim fit shirts in the 90s. It’s also about complicated Dad feelings and nostalgia.
In retrospect Anything You Want sounds 90s by way of Todd Rundgren. Great vocals.
Take A Walk goes hard. A real rocker that presages 2022’s Lucifer on the Sofa.
10 20 am is like the chamber pop songs The Kinks put on b-sides. Imagine if Spoon had a Dave Davies for backing vocals. I love Daniel’s voice and yet, what if he had a younger brother with even more rasp and nasality!?! IMAGINE!
Take the Fifth has become an all time favorite song. It reminds me ofLilys’ perfect distillation of 1966. The song is tight as fuck till a key few moments when it deliberately sounds like it’s about to fall apart. Like the tension of the off-key piano notes they hit at 1:46. That’s drama!
This Book is a Movie is an early exploration to a cinematic style they’ll expand in the future. Bit of a Steely Dan vibe?
Chicago At Night is a modern take on The Kinks’ character study songs but loaded with self recognition too.
The album is over too soon and I still don’t know what exactly it is that Girls Can Tell. Perhaps the title is a play on Dave Edmund’s song Girls Talk(written by Elvis Costello)?
I’m usually not into the bands Spoon get’s filled away with. I find that era of indie band full of dullness and dudes that can’t sing. But Spoon is MY indie band. Maybe yours too?
Thank you, Elana!
Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #1 Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT defeated #16 Low, THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, 179-140.
Thanks,
Kent
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