The cover of Cory Branan’s new album, When I Go I Ghost (Blue Élan), featuring a photo of an old sedan speeding past an enigmatic twist of vines on the highway, perfectly captures how the latest songs convey motion. The journey could almost be a travelogue, if the traveler actually stopped to inhabit the souls of random, struggling people he met along the way. The towering figure of vines could stand in for any one of those souls.
“Matt White, my buddy that used to own the White Water Tavern [in Little Rock], took that photo,” Branan says. “I liked the kudzu trying to grow an angel by the highway side.” There’s a tension between an angel’s skyward aspirations on the one hand and raw, horizontal movement over asphalt on the other. And most of the album’s characters are caught between the two.
“Somebody on the precipice, making a decision — that’s sort of the whole record,” Branan says. “It stretches out, but it goes inward a lot, too. That’s the crux of it, the stay-or-go sort of thing. But you know me, I didn’t write these as a song cycle. It’s just a bunch of songs I had about doubt, loss, depression, general stir-craziness. But I knew I didn’t want to make a record that pondered itself, I wanted it to have motion. So I gave this record an overarching rule: The sadder the song, the more it had to move and groove.”
That’s especially true of one of the saddest songs he’s written, “That Look I Lost,” about a man “dying to find that look I lost in her eyes.” It’s delivered as a pure slice of blue-eyed soul, complete with groovy Wurlitzer electric piano and horn punches in the chorus. “That song was so sad that it needed something to make it triumphant sadness. It needed that Motown thing. It didn’t just sit there and wallow. A lot of the record is that sort of thing: It’s got a sort of spacious vs. restlessness thing going on.”
Beyond restlessness, Branan is more willing than ever to explore the outright desperation of his characters; at times the songs seem to jump out of a James Ellroy novel. “The record gets down in a valley,” he says, “and then starts slowly getting its ass out of there.” The lowest point is surely “Pocket of God,” a noirish tale of a pimp or a kingpin mulling over his greatest protege. “So tenderly I took her indoors/Bought her some tits and fixed her teeth/You should’ve seen her crunch a number/Work a sucker, shoot a breeze … She was a punch I couldn’t counter/Sometimes I’s tempted to applaud/Just being around her/Felt like I picked the pocket of God.”
It’s all set in a kind of modern American hellscape evoked by the album’s sound: synthesizer pads, or even synth bass, filled out with finely-rendered, classic rock energy, broadly speaking. Yet as one zooms in, one finds a far-reaching eclecticism at work. Recorded and produced by Grammy-winning engineer Jeremy Ferguson in Nashville (with horns added in Memphis), the record follows the twists and turns of Branan’s wide stylistic taste, perhaps even more than his previous five albums.
“I get restless,” he explains. “Jeremy was great. He’s the perfect mix. He can do anything, sonically. The big thing for me was making sure the drums were right. Because I wanted a ’70s drum sound that was dry and in your face. That left a lot of room for more character on the bass, a little more sonic territory. I wanted it to still sound like people-sized instruments in a room.”
The people in that room are worth noting as well: Jason Isbell who appears on five songs, Garrison Starr who duets with Branan on “Waterfront,” and Brian Fallon from The Gaslight Anthem. Despite such disparate contributors and stylistic detours, the album hangs together with a consistent sonic vision. For Branan, realizing that vision has been a long time coming. “It took me a lot of records to figure out how to keep that ‘band in a room’ feel while I’m chasing my more ambitious rabbits, sonically.”
Cory Branan, with a Memphis-based band (David Cousar, Rick Steff, and Shawn Zorn), will appear at the Hi Tone with American Aquarium on Sunday, December 11th.