Front Page Reviews & AIR

“We were stranded on the vine, destitute and shaken, looking for a sign.”

- The Jayhawks, “Trouble” from Sound of Lies

In 1997, Gary Louris was 42 years old.  He had struggled for nearly two decades to get where he was.  His band, the Jayhawks, formed in 1985 with co-frontman/singer/songwriter Mark Olson, had been on the road scratching out a living for the better part of seven years before landing a major record deal—in 1992.  They subsequently released two cult-classic albums (Hollywood Town Hall, 1992, and Tomorrow the Green Grass, 1995) big enough to build a career on.  As fortune would have it, their modest success coincided with a burgeoning “alt-country” movement that included Wilco, Son Volt, Whiskeytown and others.  By 1997, this scene was starting to get recognition outside of its own circles.  The time was perfect for the Jayhawks to take the next step.  But, as Roy Hobbs says in The Natural, “Things turned out different than I expected.”

It’s funny how circumstances that are a recipe for disaster can sometimes be a source of greatness.  By the time the Jayhawks entered the studio to record Sound of Lies, Mark Olson had abruptly and unexpectedly left the band, and their status with their record label was uncertain.  At 42, Louris would have to become the lone frontman for the first time, and he would also have to shoulder the weighty expectation that the Jayhawks would make a genre-defining statement for “alt-country.”  In the face of all this, there seems to have been a conscious decision made by Louris and the band to approach this album as if they might never get a chance to make another.  There’s an overwhelming feeling of desperation and futility on this record, but there is also a feeling of defiance.  It’s as if the band knows that whatever they do, good or bad, it’s all over.  They know they don’t need to make a pop hit; the radio won’t play them anyway.  They know they don’t need to sound like the Louris/Olson Jayhawks; those fans will be disappointed no matter what.  And they’re asking themselves, what’s the sense in trying to get involved in a new rock genre-movement when we’re old enough to be parents of some of these kids?  In the midst of this knowledge and these questions, Louris is pretty obviously also dealing with an irreparably broken personal relationship somewhere in here, too.  Well, fuck it, say Louris and the Jayhawks.  We’re going to make the greatest music we can make.  Even if nobody hears it.

What they ended up with was the most heartbreaking, desperate and beautiful album since Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks.  It’s similar to that album in that all of its themes are very adult.  Every relationship is full of history.  Every story has a few layers.  Every feeling is questioned a few times.  There is the sense that they had been through a few different incarnations of themselves and learned different things than what they had expected.  Unlike albums by contemplative twenty-somethings that are full of nostalgia, these albums are full of regret.  And alongside that regret is an underlying suspicion:

Would you take my hand?

Would you be my friend?

Take my advice: Go away

When the days get short

And the chips are down

Will you be there?

Will you stick around?

The question is rhetorical.  Of course the answer is no.  And these are the lines that open the album.  But, as with all great art, it isn’t that simple.  The song’s title, “The Man Who Loved Life,” isn’t so much ironic as tragic.  When Louris sings, “He’s the man! He’s the man! He’s the man who loved life,” he seems to be focusing on the past tense of “loved.”  He’s not sure if he does love life anymore.  There is this struggle throughout the album between death and life, depression and joy, darkness and light.  But it never plays out in a melodramatic or moralistic way.  The songs are all stories about people.  Some of them are personal, some of them are fictional, some are both.   But they all walk this line on the edge of tragedy, like in a Dostoevsky novel, where the characters are consumed with blindness and desperation, but are never more than a smile away from salvation.  It’s too late for the couple in “Think About It,” as one of them ends up a suicide (much to the disappointment of the county coroner), and the chorus nonchalantly suggests, “Think about it once, what you got to lose?”  It takes a certain kind of desperate real-life character to so convincingly inhabit those lines.

“It’s Up to You” starts off as a return to the old alt-country Jayhawks, with a lighter feel and a toe-tapping bounce.  But this is just the first of a series of vignettes about the woman who haunts the record:  “Heard you bragging about the boys you took / Are you a victim or a small time crook? / Or just a little fool? / You know, you know it’s up to you.”  A little bitter, maybe, but just calling it like it is.  No reason not to anymore, right?  It’s over anyway…  Except then comes “Stick in the Mud,” just simply one of the saddest songs you’ll ever hear.  It comes from that place just far enough removed from the breakup to realize it’s over, but still close enough to remember that the love was real.  When Louris begs, “Let me be nice to you, you’re still my best friend,” you just want to hug him.  Because even he knows it’s not true.

The all-out road-rocker, “Big Star,” with its chorus of “I’m gonna be a big star someday,” doesn’t end up being as sarcastic as it sounds.  While the irony is obvious, it’s also a look back at a former version of yourself who believed that better things were possible:  “Straight, honest, forthright and true / Great expectations for someone.”  In the end there is a defiance that adds a third layer of meaning to the chorus line.  “Grape’s bitter / I’m no quitter,” says Louris.  He knows he’ll never be a “big star,” but he’s gonna say it anyway, because it should be true.

With all the tales of untimely death (“Sixteen Down”), disillusion (“Trouble”) and pain (“Stick in the Mud”), Sound of Lies earns its rare moments of hope, like at the end of “Haywire.”  A long and odd little travelogue with a chorus that blurts, “My whole life has gone haywire,” it ends with the spontaneous refrain of “Smile, smile, smile / That’s alright.”  It doesn’t make logical sense, necessarily, but it resonates in its willingness to acknowledge and embrace the good things.  And this is the secret power of the album.  Even though it documents so much that is wrong, so much heartbreak, it refuses to accept these things as the final word.  The end of a relationship doesn’t mean nearly as much if you don’t believe that love can be real.  The loss of innocence isn’t tragic if you believe innocence to be a lie.  Sound of Lies chronicles a series of stories that, taken together, amount to an all-out assault on everything that is good and true.  We all know these stories.  A young girl drowns, a loved one betrays us, people believe lies.  In the end, in the closing title track, Louris struggles to make sense of his belief that what is good is the real truth, against which the “sound of lies rings funny.”  The best he can come up with is a childhood vision: “Mama said it’d work out right / Boulevards and green leaves billowing…”  And yet, the way he sings it, it’s enough.  It’s the smile that leads to salvation.

Musically, Sound of Lies is the perfect mixture of reckless abandon and the sort of quality song-crafting you might expect from some great veteran musicians.  While there are laid-back, slow, and really beautiful moments (especially the title track), there is an overwhelming sense of urgency to the music throughout the album that perfectly matches the songwriting.  It’s also clear that this is a band that has tossed out their playbook and is really challenging themselves to climb outside the box.  There are several left turns and a few noise interludes, but it always comes down to the songs.  Marc Perlman’s melodic bass line on “Sixteen Down” is never distracting; instead it anchors the song.  As does his contribution to the album’s most urgent track, “Dying on the Vine,” in which drummer Tim O’Reagan lays down the perfect insistent complement.  As for Louris himself, his guitar work has never been better, moving effortlessly from tasteful background stuff to emotional, jagged solos that put Neil Young to shame.  Gary Louris is simply one of the best rock guitar players there is, and he shows it all over this album through both his restraint and his sublime outbursts of noise.

While there’s nothing really new about the sound the Jayhawks create on Sound of Lies, it also doesn’t really sound like anything else.  It’s not “alt-country,” its not “alt-rock,” it’s not “pop.”  It’s the sound of a supremely talented group of veteran musicians laying it all on the line with no idea whether anyone will care.  They might lose their label, they might lose their fans, they might lose their jobs.  That was all in somebody else’s hands.  All the Jayhawks could do for themselves what throw everything they had into Sound of Lies. 

Five years later, Wilco was in a similar position (band falling apart, label falling apart) as they were making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  The process would be immortalized in the film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and that album would go on to be celebrated as a modern classic.  But part of the thing about Sound of Lies, part of the reason it’s so perfect, is that it wasn’t celebrated.  Not then.  Not now.  All of the worst fears of its creators were realized.  All of the futility the album talks about turned out to be real.  And this is what it has over Foxtrot.  The songs are so grounded – or buried might be more like it – in reality.  The kind of reality that finds you saying things like, “You got the sweetest eyes, you just couldn’t be mean,” to the one who just tore your heart out of your chest.  Sound of Lies is that kind of album.  It never has you thinking about studio wizardry or how “groundbreaking” it is – how could that matter when you’re “stranded on the vine, destitute and shaken?” 

That exhilaration of having nothing to lose permeates the album.  In the liner notes, each band member drops a few inside-joke-type of lines to remember Sound of Lies by.  All of them make reference to “Art ‘96” as the working ethos for what they were trying to accomplish.  But bassist Marc Perlman’s lines capture it best: “A collective, unbound and unfettered (and pretty good singers to boot) who asked for nothing except to be left alone (and a rope with which to hang themselves) and, granted exactly that, closed the gallery and jumped into the abyss holding hands…frightened, exhilarated and smiling the whole way down.”