As I've pondered throughout the months returning to my neglected, starving, dying blog I resolved to make my grand return a review of On Promenade. Now it should be stated that I planned my return much closer to the release date in October of 2007. The factors that have prevented this review have been fear--fear of the responsibility of maintaining regular posting habits--and shame--embarrassment that my last post still has me writing my thesis. (For those curious, I finished.) Perhaps a third deterrent is the daunting task of putting into words the rushing current of emotion and thought that overwhelm the album's unsuspecting listener. But here goes.
There I sat in the small music venue in Deep Ellum, Dallas, TX. The crowd was small but loyal. Of the seven in the crowd, two faces were familiar--regulars at this venue. This particular show is a "songwriters-in-the-round,"--a song-swap between three artists. The second in the trio, Doug Burr, is my reason for attendance. He sits in a chair heaving a jumbo-body Larrivee onto his knee. The cedar top on this enormous guitar delivers a boomy, bassy sound as the songwriter begins a slow country strum accenting the bass note. The lyrics tell of a girl watching trains roll through town wishing she could hop one and leave town. One particular night a "black train" picks up speed and barrels toward a town of sleeping citizens. The lyrics move to a refrain of warning--"Wake up baby a train is coming..." We in the audience can feel it picking up steam as Dougs strumming picks up speed and intensity. Just when Burr is screaming and guitar strings teeter on the verge of snapping the beat quickly dies...(as do the citizens of Graniteville?) The ending is left open and the audience left speechless. Prior to that moment I had been a fan, but that song made me a believer. From that point I hounded Doug after shows, "When is a new album coming out?" "Will it have Graniteville on it?"
A career change and a move meant I caught fewer Doug Burr performances but the anticipation grew for an album wherein Graniteville would be showcased. When Doug pre-released four songs on his myspace page I knew this album would be more than just Graniteville + other songs. Still that fear that you get when you sit to watch a comedy and you fear the only five funny scenes were already shown in the over-played preview began to set in. A year later when the album came out all fears ceased. This time I found myself in another small venue, this time packed with eager fans--the CD release show. I bought my copy early in the night. Clutching it and toying with it throughout the show. If Graniteville was stirring in a solo act it quaked with a full band. "Whippoorwill" was haunting but hopeful. "In the Garden" was driving and despondent. When the night was over I maintained a quick pace to my car, parked on a dark backstreet off Lower Greenville, my fingernails finding the seams in the cellophane and peeling it off impatiently. I popped it in the player in my car and, as it is my habit to listen to an album start to finish at least 5 times before I skip to songs I like, I started at the beginning.
Slow Southern Home is an ideal opener. Doug's vocals invite the listener into the story. The drone of the organ beckoning the same. This 11 song story begins with the story-tellers dream of an "ancient house," his "slow southern home." The idyllic language allows the listener to insert his/her own idea of home into this "dream." From here Doug moves into a droned-bass fingerpicking slightly more optimistic in its tone, but as soon as we find "gold in the hills" we are assured that "there is a darkness hanging o'er the West here in the land of progress." Whether the West is Gold Rush California or the New World America's, the optimism is misplaced. Nevertheless the song ends with a playful chorus of shakers and Doug's alyrical crooning. The third track is none other than Graniteville. Burr's version of fire-and-brimstone, this song is an allegory for sin and it's consequences. Whippoorwill at the same time praises the Whippoorwill for her song and bemoans her audiences ability to sing a song in every language. He covets the bird's "song and it's reason to sing." He wishes he could "call to you/You? from the tops of these trees, and when the winter comes we'd flap our wings and leave." The end of the song finds the singer asking his companions to lay aside their voices and instruments presumably due to the relative inadequacy of their songs to do what the Whippoorwill does. The next two songs are linked musically and thematically. The first is a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo wherein he speaks of "love even unreturned." The hum of the electric guitar and Wurlitzer bridge the seam between "How Can the Lark" and "Should've Known"--an "I told you so" to the grandson of Theo Van Gogh, killed for his film exposing Muslim abuses of women, who should've learned the bloody lessons of his great-uncle. You may get the sense from my description and from the above artwork of the ominous character holding a guitar in a darkened wood, that this is a dark album. On the whole your senses are not failing you, but music can do strange things to the senses. Burr can drag you through the slough because he is ever keeping before you the golden meadow on the other side. "In the Garden" is a perfect example. One might suspect Doug is following up his gospel concept album, "The Sickle and the Sheaves" with his own arrangement of the 20th Century hymn. On the contrary the slightly distorted, bassy intro is consummated with the opening line, "Devils thorns and gears, Been that way for years." One's mind quickly shifts from the garden where "He walks with me and He talks with me" to something cold, harsh, and industrial. In the background, Burr suggests, you can "hear somebody laughing." Burr is less than comforting when he confesses, "I have a sinking feeling it gets worse, worse before better better." However, as he finishes the last chorus which is meant to build into the bridge, the instruments are backed out slightly and the lyrics take center stage as Burr observes, "I hear somebody weeping in the garden." The biblical imagery has moved from Eden to Gethsemane. The laughing serpent is replaced by a weeping Savior. This theme is repeated in "Thing About Trouble." Hear the listener is placed in a river gorge. The beauty around her is deceiving and she is encouraged instead to keep moving ahead, waiting for "the day." Despair and hope sway and spin as one, but ruin gives way to resurrection as the listener is assure that a flood is coming, but that "everything that sinks one day it will rise, eyes, tooth, and tongue." "Last Promenade" is one of the most beautifully arranged songs on the album, opening with pert and airy fingerpicking which quickly falls among the steady hums of the organ and accordion. The imagery is thick and elusive, and whatever the details may signify, what begins as a party is crashed and left to the dogs and the singer is left standing on a promenade with no ticket as a train barrels by. "Always Travel Light" is the proverbial "you can't take it with you" warning delivered, as promised, with the lightest touch. The last song of the album moves in slow with steel guitar and organ gently lulling. Burr's vocal sound downcast as he sings of a figure "dressed in white moving through the dark." As bleak as the song may feel the message remains hopeful as the closing line claims, "I have cut you, I have kissed you, Blood runs down, runs downhill."
Without the prospect of a Slow Southern Home, I wonder if anyone would bear with Burr the wallows of tragedy, love lost, and gardens overrun with thorns. Would you wade the slough with no portension of golden meadows? And yet, Burr does not leave us in thorny Eden, or deceptively beautiful gorges. He takes us to Gethsemane, he tells us of the coming flood. He brings us to Golgotha where we lay dead or dying at the foot of a hill, blood flowing from the crags of the rocks over our wounded flesh. There sunken eyes, broken teeth, crooked tongues find the promise, the hope, of resurrection. There everything that sinks is to one day rise.
