“It’s a miracle I’m not a drug addict, but it’s a shame I’m still hard at it.” So sings John Vanderslice on ‘I’ll Wait For You’, lead single of his new record The Cedars. It encapsulates his ever candid and gritty approach to writing, and life in general. No stranger to writing music, The Cedars marks his 11th studio album amongst a host of EP’s and other releases, this nonetheless feels a rarified event. A near-death experience involving a van accident while on tour in 2014 led him to quit writing music. “After that happened, maybe a second later, I was like, I’m done. I don’t want to die in a van, It wasn’t sad, it wasn’t celebratory. It was just like, eh, I had a good run.” With that same apparent unflappability, he’s since made a quiet name for himself as a producer; his small, all-analog recording studio Tiny Telephone overseeing various indie royalty releases from Death Cab for Cutie and Tune-yards to Deerhoof and The Mountain Goats. But it seems inspiration is never far away for Vanderslice, and has coaxed him out of his self-imposed exile and back to the other side of the glass.
Inspired by a piece of land he owns in West Sonoma, The Cedars feels like a necessary outpouring of inner being for Vanderslice. Something uncontainable, that’s been dormant far too long. “It takes up a mythic space in my mind,” he says, “like the perfect sound, the perfect lyric.” As a natural muse, such an account of inspiration is difficult to sidestep with words like ‘perfect’ being bandied about, but it certainly feels very natural in more ways than one. Beyond just Vanderslice’s proclivity for analog instrumentation – his self-titled ‘sloppy hi-fi’ approach to writing – or the sound steeped so clearly in the natural surrounds of the music’s physical reference point, it crucially feels like a brimming over of the creativity stored inside Vanderslice for the last few years. Much of it isn’t comfortable. “Broken heart, fuck you and your time, this wandering. This is no time to sing out,” he murmurs on ‘Will Call’, an honest look at broken relationships beyond mere heartbreak. “Let it go”, is his repeated mantra, even if he seems unable to do so. The aforementioned ‘I’ll Wait For You’ propelled by its distant analog drum rhythm and lo-fi punk undertones goes on, “I got you into this, but I can’t get you out of this, ‘cause I’m always gonna use.” These are sentiments that bubble to the surface throughout his lyricism, as though the mythic space of the cedars is where he can truly confront his inner demons.
There are some moments of tranquility reflective of the records leafy surrounds. ‘Spectral Dawn’s jazzy high-hats and wandering melodies provide a calm sojourn for its five minutes. The persistent piano line holding aloft snippets of personal wordplay the likes of, “is Audrey working tonight? No, she’s off,” and, “when I held your hand it was crystalline, when I touched your skin I was back again in the spectral night.” Glimpses of the lives Vanderslice has led and that which he chooses to share. The two ‘Interludes’ are precisely that, brief stretches of pretty ambience, while ‘I Got Shit to Lose’ has a delicate 60’s surf-rock element to it, almost Beatles-esque, as his voice loses the slight punk nasality he often holds in favor of a gentler approach to the vocals. But the writing and production always lends a nasality to dissonance rather than assonance. Every pretty chord progression or melody has a slightly jarring harmonic or shift. As if Vanderslice can never quite be entirely positive or content. Always experiments, meddling, not happy to leave things be; and that works in the record’s favor. Exemplified in the final moments of ‘Enter the Void’ where a weird little jam of stuttering drums and samplers that abruptly ends closes out the record. It sums up the record really. Not a perfect album, but that’s what makes it a gem. As if it is for Vanderslice, in this moment, the perfect sound, the perfect lyric.
