Speaking of Will Oldham, I like his newer music, but in the '90s into the early '00s I was high near obsessed with him, buying everything he released that I could find. I still think his run of albums from the Palace Brothers debut to I See a Darkness, plus all the singles and EPs that fall in there, are uniformly great. There's not a body of work quite like it in American music, nor one nearly so solid from the last few decades, and it's pretty remarkable how different each of those first six albums are. I can go on and on about him, and may do in the future, but I wanted to single out these two relatively overlooked recordings, Get On Jolly and Get The Fuck On Jolly Live.
I had them on my mind recently, probably because the sparse quality of the music always seems to work best in cold, dreary weather. Or so I thought, until after listening to them a couple of weeks ago during such weather, I was struck by the desire to hear them last weekend when we had an unseasonable 70 degree sunny Sunday afternoon. They sounded just as perfect then, too, their more buoyant charms complimented by the weather.
The songs here are derived from the Gitanjali by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. I know very little about Tagore, other than what I read here, in Yeats' introduction to the author's translation. (And for some reason I think his poetry was somewhat fashionable in the '60s and '70s, probably mainly among hippies.) I've never read the poems and have no future plans to do so, primarily because the song versions of them on these records work so well for me. I can't imagine reading them silently and I certainly don't want to read them out loud myself. That's probably not the best way of getting the most out of the poems, or hewing to their true spirit, but I'm far more concerned with this musical translation of them than I am the poems themselves. The ones selected by Bonnie and Tren are all love songs, very romantic poems evoking pastoral and animal themes, with a healthy dose of self-reflexive content about sitting around singing, composing poems, wooing and getting drunk.
The Marquis de Tren is inimitable Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. If you're familiar with that band, or more specifically Tren Brothers, Turner's duo with D3 drummer and all-around badass Jim White, (or even more specifically, Turner's solo records), you have a pretty good idea of what the Jollys sound like. The music is lightly brooding but romantic, atmospheric and just in general very, very lovely. The kind of stuff you imagine a modern Young Werther might like. And you know what Will's singing sounds like. Relying more on emotive resonance than technical proficiency, his vocals have become a bit more palpable to the normal human ear in the past decade, and it's not difficult to imagine some sort of training is to be blamed/thanked. (Some reviewer, in Puncture I think it was, wrote they always pictured Huckleberry Hound when listening to him, but that person was probably a sheltered Yankee.) But these two recordings, from 1999 and 2001, catch him in what I think of as more or less his vocal prime, shorn of much of the warble and strain of his first few records, but not so clean as of late. Honestly, a casual listener might not notice much difference between now and then, and it's the kind of voice that will only ever speak to a limited number of listeners, which is why I always found it amusing he begins both Jolly recordings with the lines "When you ask me to sing, it feels like my heart will burst with pride" before continuing "I know you take pleasure in my singing," kind of howling the "knooow" a bit. It's funny, but also absolutely perfect, because Will's lyrics and music tend toward the romantic anyway, so it's easy to imagine him wooing someone by singing these poems, and if you're a fan, you do take pleasure in his singing, and you know that he knows he has a fairly limited vocal range. It also brings these occasionally perfumey poems down to a less courtly, more pedestrian setting. To illustrate that thought, imagine what drama queens like Celine Dion or Streisand or even Nick Cave or Antony would do with these songs, and compare it to Will's more approachable approach. If, like me, you're always hopelessly out of tune, it's perfectly ok to sing along with him and not sound so off. In fact, using his as a guide vocal, it's fun.
Get On Jolly is a studio-recorded EP, while Get the Fuck On Jolly Live is, as its title makes clear, a live recording that's a bit lengthier. I prefer the EP, not only because I think Will's voice sounds better on it, but also because I listened to it constantly during a sad, lonely and impressionable time of my life, and though I know its limitations and dangers, I can be a sucker for nostalgia. It's the kind of music that makes being lovelorn bearable, offering an idealized impression of what it will be like when you get to be in love again. I suppose I could try to make an aesthetic argument for it, but really I don't even want to try. Some things work best on a personal level. One great thing about the live recording is it features a few songs not on the EP, including the immaculate "LXXXVI" (all the titles are the poem's numbers in the text), in which Will ecstatically repeats "I found a new way of living, I found a joy of my own" while Mick works his magic on guitar and harmonium.
But both recordings are truly special, and would make perfect Valentine's Day listening. Or, if you want, you could learn the songs and sing them to your special someone. I doubt you'll improve on Will and Mick, but if you lie and say you wrote these songs for your adored, you're guaranteed some action.
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