AHC's Top Ten Albums of 2018 by James Diaz

10: Tracy Grammer – Low Tide

“i’m afraid i don’t know what i’m made of anymore
can’t make sense of all these shatterlings upon the bedroom floor
there’ll be no sleeping here, just blurs of sorrow through the open door
shoulda warned those boys about me, shoulda warned those boys”

And so begins Low Tide, the powerful new album by veteran singer-songwriter Tracy Grammer, whose opening track, Hole, is sprinkled with the sound of laughter. Not incidental, as Grammer’s journey has been far from an easy one. Having lost her songwriting partner Dave Carter back in 2002, the road to such laughter, let alone accompanying an album, bears much of the unseen work of daily grieving, creating, forging ahead, unknowns, dark midnight battles, prayed for mornings and life anew.

The first record to feature much of Grammer’s own songwriting, Low Tide is living proof of Tracy’s ability to find the words and the sounds that push hope through and to make a life sing after the storm waters have receded.

In full command of every rise and fall of the valleys of this season in her life, Low Tide pivots between world weary words to the wise and tender spots of mercy;

“everybody’s in their places
with plastic buckets and hopeful faces
padded stools and a couple glasses
one for liquor, one for ashes”

-Forty-Niner

And speaking to the dark and hard internal fight to take the stage after the loss of her fellow companion of song and truth, she sings in Mercy;

“can’t start, too scared
out of time and unprepared
coulda jumped but you didn’t dare
afraid to get it wrong

tongue-tied, tripped again
nobody’s gonna tell you when
or if it’s right, or what you win
or how to sing your song
no

chicken child, all but broke
sway or worry, swallow smoke
swinging from a scarlet oak
it’s ashes out to sea”

But the mercy bit, much like life itself, comes toward the end. On Free, Grammer sings;

“once upon a heartbreak, i was hot and sore
punching at the darkness in my private war
i could not find the light i was so desperate for
or any open door

i wore my tattered shoes out on the grieving road
fell into the arms of folks i didn’t know
finally got so weary of this heavy load
i learned to let it go”

And to find voice for sorrows and joys, the way a light you didn’t know was on in a house you lost sight of in the thick fog of the woods suddenly reveals itself to you; come on in, your beds all made, soup is on, this is the place you belong. And you must sing your song.
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​9: Lucy Wainwright Roche – little beast

“One smile is a lot to ask” opens Little Beast. Here where “bad luck is a rule of thumb,” Roche drives the listener through what could be an apocalypse of one’s own making. Deep sorrow out of our control or the lit match in our own hand all long, “we’re on an island worse than small,” an island on the inside of our body, “you are a burning bleeding part of me.”

“Quit with me, there is no closer we will grow to be.” The sad inner linings of Little Beast are the darkest hours we’ve ever known and if we’re lucky have also outgrown. But this isn’t an album for the lucky. It is for the lost, the damaged, the overcrowding dark. “If everyday’s a warning, well we never heed it right.”

Little Beast is not at all an easy listen. Musically it is mournful, lyrically it is devastating. The light here is hardly on. And that’s just as valid a part of life as anything else is. We need the songs that refuse to reassure us just as much as we need those that do.

“Everybody’s troubled,
that’s a bet that you won’t lose,
the trouble that you’re born with
and the trouble that you choose.”

Storm from out of nowhere or lit match in hand, we will all be laid low nonetheless.

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8: Malcolm Holcombe – Come Hell or High Water

Malcolm is one of the best kept secrets on the Americana scene. His gravelly voice like the back roads of North Carolina, well worn and hard traveled. It often sounds like Halcombe is singing to an old friend, bar mate, war buddy, down and outer.

“Now you don’t know better,
you’re strung out in the cold,
and you don’t know better when you got no home,
now you don’t know better when you’re left alone to die.” 

Accompanied on many of the songs by Iris DeMent, Come Hell or High Water is a mournful, resilient, uniquely American sound. It’s the America not of milk and honey, but of canned beans and church pantry Thanksgiving baskets. It’s making do and getting by. It’s gratitude for whatever the hell is left at the end of the year, not much, but just enough.

“Merry Christmas,
fried chicken,
leftovers in the morning,
I never got what I wanted,
I never cared for what I got,
Merry Christmas.”

Gruff is the lay of Malcolm’s land. The place where politicians rarely visit, where hard living is second nature;

“forgive me when I turn away,
and I mumble to the floor,
and the perfect words are gone for sure,
and the mirror’s torn and wrinkled,
it’s hard to measure up inside.”

Holcombe is for the weary, the worn out, the passed by, small town hurt, huge hearted nonetheless, getting by on very little, getting by on whatever’s left. Come Hell or High Water. Sink or swim. Shit or get off the pot. Malcolm is a straight shooter, calls it like he sees it, he sees a lot of hurt and a lot of lack in this land. He’s what Woody Guthrie would be singing if Woody were still with us now.

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7) Lucy Kaplansky – Everyday Street

“I remember us sitting on the floor
Singing every song we knew
Richard and Linda Thompson
Gram and Emmylou

We could tell each other everything
And we still do
Keeping our shared secrets
That’s what good friends do”

Lucy’s Everyday Street is a drive down familiar roads, the songs sung, the joys and sorrows held in hand alike, a recollection, a scrap book of growing older, oneself and ones children.

“Your first birthday, just your dad and me
Little face covered in ice cream
We made a wish for you, blew your candle out
Thought that baby you’d always be

Oh was ten years ago
We’ll turn around and you’ll be grown
Oh one day you’ll be on your own
You’re gonna let us go”

Kaplansky’s voice has reached a deeper register in recent years, not only an effect of time but of experience too. Every loss gives something that cannot be tallied or known outright, but it shows up in unexpected moments years later. We carry all that we’ve been through with us and it does not always weigh the same as it did when we started out on our travels.

“Old things end with something new” and so it is fitting that Everyday Street ends with The Tide, one of Lucy’s earliest songs.

"I was made to be a good girl 
Carried buckets made of stone
Full of envy, full of sorrow
On a tightrope all alone

And all the time I was on fire
I burned with every stride
And now I see this anger
Is the horse I choose to ride"

Something new comes from the other end of life, an older girl singing to a younger one. A deeper register. Joni Mitchell once remarked that Both Sides Now was never really meant to be sung by a young ingenue but by an older, wiser self. We know the difference immediately when we hear Joni sing it now and when he hear her recording then. Likewise, on The Tide, Lucy enters the song from the other side of life, and when she sings “I have nothing for you tonight” it is truly spoken to that doubting place.

“I think that the feeling of isolation I was writing about in The Tide is somewhat universal,” Lucy once said. “A hell of a lot of people feel overwhelmed and stuck with whatever it is they carry with them from childhood. I’d like to think that whenever you come up with something that is emotionally true, it is universal by definition. Somewhere someone else has experienced that emotion. We’re not so different from one another.”

Everyday Street is quite simply the place of recognition. Of time, growing older, love, loss, singing and laughter. Kaplansky continues to weave one of the best musical tapestries around.

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6) Gretchen Peters – Dancing with The Beast

“Sometimes the days go by like years,” that line alone will lay you flat. On Dancing with The Beast, veteran songwriter Gretchen Peters has made one of her finest records to date.

“I get lost in my home town
Since they tore the drive-in down
I find myself all turned around
I get lost in my home town”

The aching details of our everyday struggle, getting through, staring down old ghosts in the mirror, reckoning with our place in the world, the kitchen tables where we hate the shapes sat in them, the shapes of ourselves.

In Disappearing Act a woman reflects on the rotten short straws that have been dealt and drawn; “lost two babies, kept two more,” and a husband back from the war;

“He came home but he never came back
And that’s somethin’ that I’ll never understand

Good things come, good things go
If it lifts you up, it’ll lay you low
People leave and they don’t come back
Life is a disappearing act”

Peters goes for the throat, where words get stuck she pushes them clean through. In "Lowlands" Gretchen sketches the political divide in Raymond Carver like fine detail;

“i come straight home from work and fix my supper
Don’t burn one with my neighbor anymore
Ever since he put that sticker on his bumper
I just turn out the lights and lock the doors”

“I don’t know nobody feeling hopeful
I don’t know a soul who’s sleeping well…

I don’t think anybody knows just what the cost is
I don’t think anybody knows just what to do

Me I’m thankful for this work that keeps me honest
My hands get dirty but my soul stays clean
‘Cause the grinding of the wheel will make you crazy
I don’t want no part of that machine”

“the tv it just lies to keep you watching,” and a man who sells you kerosene and calls it hope, pits hate against the world and calls it good. Dancing With The Beast means; take a good long look in the mirror, do you like who you see staring back out at you? Can we ever get back to normal?

"Truckstop Angel" is a poem and a back alley prayer. And some of the finest lyrics Peters’ has ever penned:

“I meet them in the truckstops
I meet them in the bars
I meet them in the parking lots
And I slip into their cars

They come and put their money down
They come and place their bets
I swallow their indifference
But I choke on my regrets

Sometimes they ask me questions
Sometimes they treat me nice
You don’t know what you’ll get
Until you roll the dice

You’re a loser or a winner here
Predator or prey
I’m still not sure which one I am
Or how I got this way

And it’s hard to hear the angels
Over the diesels’ hum
But I know they’re out there singing
And I’ll know them when they come

And I’ll rise above the neon
Above this trailer park
And fly like a truckstop angel
With an arrow through my heart.”

Buy this record for a glimpse into the broken heart of America, of being down and out and running ragged after the ever receding tail lights of hope on a rain torn strip of road. Dance with the beast in the mirror, that one, true, unadorned glimpse of yourself.

5) Eliza Gilkyson – Secularia

 
“Dark comes down like a bird in flight/Most good people have gone to rest/But us poor folk who wake at night/When we’re lonely we sing our best . . . “ Gilkyson opens her new album with the words of her father and grandmother. Carrying the lyrical hope of her forebears into the deep darkness of our sad age.

Secularia isn’t some trite new age hope, it is a fierce battle with an evil with a real name and a real face, it is a battle with ourselves, our country, our soul or lack of. A few older song are revived here, Sanctuary, which originally appeared on Hard Times in Babylon, and these may be much harder times, and so the reminder, “through desolation’s fire and fears dark thunder, thou art with me.”

“The center cannot hold
This is somebody else’s dream
Out of the nighttime
Lifelines glow in the dark
Order falls apart
Nothing is as it seems
And all of the like-minds
Who reel from this blow to the heart
Turn to each other
On the night of the Supermoon”

Election of the dark heart, Conrad’s jungle soul of America. Mad Kurtz as President. In The Name of The Lord, Gilkyson has penned yet another killer protest song, as chilling as Man Of God;

“We’re prisoners in a fairytale
A ship of fools all set to sail
We watch the Empire’s epic fail
On shiny hand-held screens

The rapture of the buy and sell
The faithful at the wishing well
They rage against the infidel
Lurking in their dreams

And it’s all in the name of the lord
Pull the oil up through the sands
Desecrate the holy lands
The blood will never touch our hands

In lands so far away
The lies we tell to fill the hole
Like coins dropped in a beggar’s bowl
They can’t redeem us when we go
Into the dimming day”

“When people say keep politics out of art, I say sure, if you can keep politics out of life.” -Robyn Hitchcock

Bravery demands we sing those sacred songs, give our blood for the truth,

“A servant, a snake, a soldier, a storm
A poet, a mother, a child stillborn
A rock, a star, a drunk in a bar

How many more times dancing the skin dance
Serving the systems of violence and romance
Sobbing the sorrow, walking the wheel
Hiding the horror, fighting the feel
Pushing the will like a rock up a hill
Until, until, until

I’m drawn so slowly step by step out of this darkened place
So unaccustomed to the light, so wary of its grace
Oh how I long to hear the pipes I held before I fell
And sing the ancient songs of love, Emmanuelle”

Secularia is the broken holy place where we are all called to do or die, in goodness or dark, what will be our story in a hundred years? A land completely plundered for the almighty dollar, will the bottom line be our bottom? Or will we rise to something better, kinder? Will we be the light or the dark, yesterday or tomorrow? There is far too much at stake to be undecided.

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4: Sarah Sample – Redwing

Redwing is Sample’s best record to date. A family album of love, loss, death, father-daughter dances, the traits of one’s mother, of tender hearts that fall apart.

“When you’re bound to the old you,
you’re waging a war…
I tried to tell but I lost all the words.”

Lovers tied to the tracks of old patterns and sour communication. Family bonds broken into a million little pieces are also put back together in self affirmation and love, in “The Walk of Moving On” that is our lives even after all of the damage and fall out.

“You come to town a few times a year,
I marked a heart on my calendar for the day you’re getting here,
I had it planned, a big surprise,
Mom said you’d pick me up at six,
I’m still waiting here at nine,

but I can see it all in my mind,
I’d be twirling in your arms, I’d be flying,
and I would feel your love with every glance,
that’s how it’s supposed to go, for the daddy/daughter dance…

we never got our song, we never learned the moves,
we never got to dance around with me standing on your shoes,
I thought I was to blame, till I finally figured out I could choose a different partner,
I could fill my dance card out.”

In ‘A Day Without You’ Sample tugs at the deepest heart strings, grappling with the death of a loved one on Christmas Eve;

“we gathered around your cold body on that colder night…
for how could the sun rise on a day without you?…
I’m angry in the night when you’re not here for me to lean into”

“Don’t ask me if I’m ok,
please ask me if I’m ok.”

A stunning line if ever there was one. That push and pull that we all have to be simultaneously asked after and left alone.

Redwing is like that “family album no one’s mother keeps, the one of absolute truth telling” -Joyce Carol Oates. Much of Sample’s new album reminds me of We Were The Mulvaneys. A record of loss and hope, dysfunction and survival, of forgiveness and of grace.

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​3) John Hiatt – The Eclipse Sessions

 

With The Eclipse Sessions Hiatt has recorded one of his strongest and wisest albums to date.

“Nobody wants to talk about all that pain,” John sings on Cry to Me.

“I’m probably gonna let you down, but I swear I won’t keep you down.”

“Not one damn thing in the yard that starts,
I wonder why love is always looking for its own ghost,
or is that just what hurt people do,
find the one’s who injured them the utmost,
practically beg them to make their dreams come true.”

Ouch, truth cut down right to the bone.

“Trying every last trouble on for size,”
“dirty Nashville, that’s our home.”

On Robbers Highway, it is time itself, that thief in the night.

“Can’t feel the fingers of one hand,
last night felt like a three night stand,
mouth full of cotton, feet of clay,
I didn’t plan on waking up today,”

“I lost my brothers, I lost my friends,
only one way this thing ends,
cheap and dirty in a bad motel,
wondering what it was you used to do so well.”

Not a happy ending for an album, but an honest one. Songwriters who dwell in the dark might get swallowed whole, but although Hiatt has lived there, he has also survived and moved on. When he revisits the dark places it rings truer than anything written in the light, truer because you know what it’s like to break completely down on the side of life’s highway, you are grateful as hell to see those headlights approaching on down the road. This album is like a lift to the next town.

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2) Lori McKenna – The Tree

The Tree is a feat of time itself, time passing, time frozen over, young rage, older perspective. The apple not far from the tree;

“The tree grows where it’s planted
And that’s the fate of a fallin’ seed”

From throwing bottles at high school chain link fences to saying the things your parents used to say, McKenna weaves in and out of the past in order to open up the present as two sides of the same coin. “I could use a little of who I was in that way back when, to be young and angry again.”

And in the painful and beautiful passing of time, where;

“Houses need paint, winters bring snow
Kids, come on in before your supper gets cold
Collection plates and daddy’s billfold
And that’s how it goes
You live long enough, people get old…”

And even though we know;

“Time is a thief, pain is a gift
The past is the past, it is what it is
Every line on your face tells a story somebody knows
That’s just how it goes”

It is what a life adds up to, the people we were become the people we are now. Our voices change into the ones that once guided us along the way,  and we pass our hard won wisdom along while pining for the younger, wilder parts of ourselves as well. It’s all in the soup, who we are, who we were.

‘The Lot Behind St Mary’s’ captures perfectly the awkward, painful-as-hell flux of the many seasons of our lives and longings, to get back what has been lost, to hold tight to what hasn’t;

Cigarette smoke in an August sky
Drinkin’ the beers you convinced your older brother to buy
We hadn’t make any of our mistakes
Our world was in the cradle but innocence wasn’t in the grave

And I know we can’t go back in time
But every now and then you look at me and I know you wonder why
We can’t get back to when September was our only adversary
In the lot behind St. Mary’s

Well I thought I’d be all you’d need
But your heart was in the dark and mine was in the weeds
I’m sure the dreamer who built the first trapeze
Fell in love with someone who grew to resent the goddamn thing

And I know we can’t go back in time
But every now and then you look at me as if to wonder why
We can’t get back to the love we made before our teenage dreams were buried
In the lot behind St. Mary’s”

The Tree is as good as a record can get. McKenna has never not hit them right out of the park, but this one is right off the map.

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1) Chip Taylor – Fix Your Words

Chip Taylor is a light in these dark times. Fix Your Words is one of the most beautiful things in human existence right now. It’ll pull all of the tears you have inside of you right out. For those who could use a little “mercy now”, this is the record, this is the voice meant to deliver hope.

“Whatever devil is in me
come on out
whatever evil is lurking
show your face
I know you
I have seen you many times
over these years

whatever kindness is in me
draw your sword
whatever goodness has been held back
speak your word
I’ve heard you
but not enough times
until this time
and it’s about time
you were heard
can you scream it out
do I have your word
are you ready”

Here Taylor hones empathy to a fine art and reminds us that we are all in this thing together.

“We have not to say
we have just to do
talk is just a waste of time
for the likes of me and you
look in my eyes
feel the pain”

Perhaps;

“none of us can win this war
but we had best keep trying to”

Of unrequited love he sings;

“You know that kind of guy
when he goes, he goes”

The lie of self sufficiency is that it must be pronounced to others and not just to oneself. A voice is meant to be heard and such hearing is meant for a voice. We are not isolated creatures, there is a debt we owe each other, a debt of caring and of mercy.

"I know that we are in this together
we are definitely in this together
I can feel it, and it is a good place to be

I know we are in this whole thing together
and that is one thing they didn’t count on
the power of you and me

now it is up to each and every one of us, of course
up to ourselves
but the power of kindness, friendship,
that is pretty strong stuff

and as we are in this together
together we will rise above it
and whatever weakness we have
we will see it clearer than we ever have before

we will change it, fix it, heal it,
and we will bleed it, till we don’t need it anymore
the weakness, we don’t need it anymore”

We each have to decide not to feed that dark beast within, first and foremost, before we ever decide to feed the beast in power, there is that lion and lamb of our own hearts, an account that needs settling.

If on past records Taylor framed it as “fuck all the perfect people” here we are instead asked to pity those perfect ones;

“I am thinking about all the perfect people out there
it’s actually a sad place to be
we should pray for grace for them”

And what makes us if not others?

“I am the sum of others, caring for each other…
only then can I truly say; I am…
I am the lamp for someone I don’t know.”

In a time of mounting darkness, Fix Your Words is a gentle musical friend of truth, a roadside companion. Its ethics is of the heart, its mercy is for the fallen, and seemingly for the perfect ones as well, for the beasts who only know how to destroy whatever they touch; “it’s actually a sad place to be, we should pray for grace for them.” But we must, most of all, be that lamp for someone we don’t know. We will change it, fix it, heal it. Together.

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