"Another washout/ Brake lights showing/ Probably gonna slow down/ No way of knowing"
"A Chance Counsel" by Richard Buckner
Is there ever any way of knowing? When you’re faced with imminent disaster and the life you’re trying to live may be your own, who’s to say that slowing down is the surest way to salvation? Sometimes velocity equals vitality – accelerate into the spin, take your hands off the wheel, relinquish control and allow the physical universe to guide you where it may.
Chaos. Disorder. Doubt. No way of knowing. No more appropriate words to open a new album by Richard Buckner, who, for the past decade, has been building his reputation as a songwriter with an uncanny ability to set uncertainty to music. Dents and Shells, his seventh release, reveals that Buckner is at his best creatively when grappling with the sheer unpredictability of existence. Written in Austin, Texas, in February 2003, following the tumultuous break-up of Buckner’s marriage to his second wife, the album is at once melancholic and hopeful, as one might expect from an artist losing his mind in mid-divorce.
"I was in the midst of a little shit-fit, I guess," says Buckner. "I went through about a year-and-a-half of going kind of fucking crazy. I mean, that’s why I went to Austin. You’re allowed to fucking do that there – it’s a very forgiving town. In fact, they encourage it. It’s fucking wild down there. It’s anything you want it to be. You can go until you fuckin’ die, or you can go and then jump off. Whatever you want to do. I jumped off, but I was definitely battling some tornadoes there."
Yet the California native says that any and all emotional tempests were welcome after living in Edmonton (his ex-wife is a Canadian) for five years, by the end of which time Buckner was suffering from severe writer’s block.
"I’d been living in Canada until six months before that… and actually my writing had kind of stopped up there," he says. "When I came out of there, it was not only the change of environment, but also that I had been kind of stopped-up and it all kind of came out at once."
Dents and Shells is not perceptibly a break-up album in the same way that, say, Buckner’s 1995 debut, Bloomed, is a break-up album, and one steeped in the bitterest, most acrimonious heartache. (That record even names names!) Indeed, Dents and Shells contains a few striking, potent images, such as watching someone "sipping wine from a camping cup," images which are liable to be relationship-memory triggers for the listener as much as they are for the songwriter himself. But, as Buckner explains, over the last 10 years his writing has become much less overtly pointed, if no less poignant.
"When I first write this stuff down, I let it alone and then I come back later and I fuck with it," he says. "I throw it up in the air and where it lands, it lands. Characters and situations get changed around very randomly for a short period of time and then I work with that as a foundation. A lot of times, the unspecific part of it is just automatic."
Despite the veiled autobiographical elements in his work, then, Buckner’s songwriting has evolved well beyond mere catharsis.
"I’m not a math guy or anything, but it’s kind of like math or a puzzle to me," he says. "Putting words and sounds together. And then also this subconscious part of it, where you draw meaning from this sort of random way of writing and then shape that into something that makes the randomness more cohesive – in my own mind, anyway.
"So, I think of it more like a puzzle – a project or an exercise – which I really enjoy. It can be really frustrating, too, or a big fucking letdown. But it also can be very invigorating if you get some sort of weird combo together that you hadn’t expected and you like the way it works together. That’s totally fucking rewarding and worth all the time in the world."
Stabilizing somewhat after his temporary freak-out in Austin, Buckner has relocated once again, this time to Brooklyn, New York, where he sees no end to the inspiration he derives from the surroundings of his new neighbourhood. And he’s writing songs, trying to impose a little order on the chaos of his experiences.
"Anything can happen, anytime," he says. "I still can’t believe I’ve been married a few times. It seems strange to me that I’m a twice-divorced person. Like, I can’t even believe it, but the chaos of that is incredible. The extremes are so extreme. I can’t count on anything. I know that."
Knowing what he knows, would he ever get married again?
"Sure. I’d do anything again! I don’t regret anything. For the most part, I don’t really see it happening again. I kind of used up my get-out-of-jail-free card in that respect. I mean, am I allowed to? What’s the limit?"
Chaos. Disorder. Doubt. No way of knowing. |
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