If I don’t write my Best Music of 2003 entry until six months after 2003 ended, partly it’s situational: that's when Cindy and I move into the nice house we just bought (assuming the inspections go well), and when 99% of my music collection will be coming back from storage. But I didn’t write the entry in January back in Boston, and that was from caution: what if, say, I didn’t even hear 2003's best song until April 2004? Which, indeed, I didn’t.
By “best song”, I may mean only that David Garland’s “On the Other Side of the Window” was the year’s loveliest composition, a stately and reflective procession of grand piano, vibraphone, acoustic guitar, tuba, and violin, the sounds faded in and out with vibrantly artificial grace. I may mean only that David’s yearning sing-song combines in a magical way with the half-chanted questions from his wife and daughter: it reminds me of the Postal Service’s college-radio hit “the District Sleeps Alone Tonight”, but Garland doesn't need to process the women to sound like angels. But as much as I’d already liked David Garland’s self-assembled world of pop (especially on Togetherness), my first six minutes with On the Other Side of the Window showed me that I’d never guessed what he had in him.
Neither, perhaps, had he. His claim that Window is his best and most personal album, which would normally sound like P.R., carried the weight of his radio-DJ talent: knowing good geek-pop and good chamber-pop and good cinematic scores, that’s his job. So he convinced me I needed this one more sample of his work. He was right.
It’s not instantly clear _why_ Window feels like a leap forward and inward. The songs sound far more like vintage David Garland than like anyone else. He’s still joining rock instruments to flugelhorn and flute and accordion, he’s still got the pennywhistle-sounding “ocarina” I had to look up last time, and now he’s even playing a “psaltery” (an early stringed instrument resembling a lyre or a 12-string harp), as well as a harmonica. The songs do feel more personal, but one quick listen to rhymes like “ Lots of factors offer input/ Put ’em in perspective and let ’em combine/ Subject it all to distillation/ and what’s left is good design” won’t explain why. Karen Mantler, the twinkly-eyed daughter of two of the only jazz greats I can appreciate (Carla Bley and Michael Mantler), visits to tell David “Fold along the dotted line/ tab A fits in slot 9/ like your hand fits in mine”. What, you might wonder at this rate, could impersonal songs possibly sound like?
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Maybe an impersonal song would sound like Garland’s “Distance”, track five. His gruff vocal sings a delicate tune, but it’s overshadowed by some truly strange instrumentation. The clip-clop percussion evolves like it’s in a documentary about how free-running old-west horses were slowly replaced by the regimented wind-up horses we know today. The violin is from a chamber quartet, the guitar from an EMF/ Happy Mondays style dance band. The standup bass believes that tuning is optional and chords are a tool of the bourgeoisie; a background synthesizer seems to think that our universe is being sucked into a demon dimension and that frequencies Must Be Lower Than This Sign to escape unharmed. Somehow, this all adds up to a catchy little groove – and proof that we’re dealing with a genius. So? The Simpsons feature a gawky, myopic lab-coat-wearing genius who might start a chorus with “Finite increments elapse/ gauges, dials, and maps.” They haven’t built an episode around him and his acne yet, and no wonder.
“Good Design” has a melody the comedian Tom Lehrer would’ve had fun adapting, and it keeps its tone colors in the background, so it’s friendly – but it’s still darned strange. We fully hear the guitar’s hollow-bodied echo and decay, a flute’s piping shrillness, a dozen or so items of percussion; and there’s a simply amazing synthesizer break, like a starship built from marbles and tin cans that’s accelerating towards the speed of light.
“I’m Here” filters a verse about Times Square through traffic and rain noises, a verse about the phone through a phone, a verse about an empty hallway through the echoes of an empty hallway: what a geek! “Phantom Limb” has him doing weird things to the piano keys before he plays them, and Garland’s baritone voice shows us exactly how far into the bass range he can’t quite sing. Even R2D2 seems to be making fun of him in the background of this one.
Still, “How To”, the Karen Mantler duet, has instant charm, a laid-back Sesame Street sway. Even when Garland’s reply starts as an ominous nocturne, a few tricky chord changes bring it back into Mantler’s swing. “Self-Portrait” has a bouncy keyboard bassline and a glistening synthesizer hook: it’s catchy, within walking distance of how No Doubt songs are catchy. “I’m Here” has a melody whose logic Herb Brown (writer of “Singin’ in the Rain”) would recognize at once; “Out Here” and “Seems the Same” are lightly jazzy piano ballads. “Grip” is a death march, but in the honorable tradition of Tschaikovsky, and Hitchcock movies, and the parts of Nine Inch Nails albums that don’t want you going deaf yet. The title song, as I mentioned, is beautiful.
So okay, you decide: maybe these could be pop songs of a sort. But Garland’s pop has always been steely-eyed, observational, and that’s not how it’s supposed to go. Pop songs are about dizzying crushes, naked lust, heartache, tantrums: how dare he be “ waiting like the rings of Saturn/ Waiting to coalesce or disperse”?
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But listen closer. The man/woman duet has always been a good entry point for emotion – the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” is a perfect example, where for four glorious minutes Phil Oakey’s claim to be human didn’t sound like a robot’s joke – so let’s took at Karen Mantler’s tab A and slot 9 again. She’s “hunting high and low” for instructions “how to build... a life with you”. He’s pointing to “figure four twenty-three: Multiply the vector of my gesture/ and just add the end result/ to all the crazy things I’ve done/ and all the crazy things I meant to do/ By this formula we’ll muddle through”. Garland, on On the Other Side of the Window, is no longer watching people playing power games and whining: he’s singing about the effort to get along, to communicate. He’s singing about what words do, and what they can’t, even if you know as many words as he does.
He ponders the cosmos and time because they’re there, and for all I know he reads Stephen Hawking when he’s lonely, but the beginning and the end of the universe aren’t anything Garland can shape, so they aren’t his point. “ Hold me closer, closer, closer, closer still/ Now let me go./ There, in between release and hold/ time stands still a while, and then grows old”. For Britney Spears and her first husband, time got about nine hours older, looked at its watch, and kicked them rudely apart before morning coffee. The rest of us got to read the headlines and laugh, but it’s still our job to do better, and that takes a reading of a code – the other person’s brain – that’s still far too complex for the scientists to duplicate.
Garland’s voice is warmer, through its slightly rough texture and enunciated words, than it’s been before: less Phil Hartman, but maybe also less of Frank Sinatra’s showy croon, and more some nice-voiced New York friend talking urgently to you via the notes of the scale. “I’m here, you’re there”, he sighs over the phone: how complicated is that? “The great success, the warm caress” are in his list of things on that other side of that window, and depending which window, that’s true. We move away from home because living with Mom and/or Dad is pathetic; we go away to college because even our friends assumed we should leave this rathole town; we leave the college town because the best job offer is somewhere else, and even if it wasn’t, our college friends have their own offers to tend to. We start anew, and the only things we can be sure of taking with us are our 8-track and our microphone and our guitar, bass, drums, synthesizer, and psaltery. No wonder we want guidebooks to help us start over.
Garland, behind his window, has a stable and gifted family, a cushy and creative job, and friends who drop by to add trumpets or backing vocals. What does he know of confusion, of “timid hesitation”, of “casual comments” that “accrue in complicated ways”? Beats me, except: enough to write about it, and enough to sing it, and enough to care that he's singing it right. Enough to have had the spare hours to have mastered his musical toys. Is it wrong of me to say “Thank goodness”?
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(Thanks again to the lovely and efficient Shelly for adding David Garland to our database. All of his albums can be ordered at www.waysidemusic.com, as can cheap classics by Yes and Gang of Four and Devo, and the Science Group's a Mere Coincidence, and Curlew's a Beautiful Western Saddle.)
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