Autumn-Core: Vol. 1
rambling fall diaries + the albums i love
…It’s freak folk season, bitches.
The second air gets colder and the leaves get crisp and crunchy, the craving starts. I want guitars, and I want them to sound weird as shit. I want my vocalists even weirder — with Freewheeling-era Dylan as the line that marks the start, I want them nasal, gruff, or whining... All of the above if they can muster. I want tales straight from the void; stories with no context, or else so vague they feel eternal — so lofty and tremendous I fear that I’m in divine company. Autumn is for folk music after all; for cold nights around campfires, weaving fresh lore out of old fears.
ys by joanna newsom (2006, chamber folk)
I went on my first self-planned camping trip two falls ago, naively venturing north at the start of the cold season with my partner, Collin, and a bargain tent in tow. After setting up camp in the freezing rain, we quickly learned that the lighter we’d purchased from our local R.E.I. did not, in fact, come with fluid. Freezing cold and scared of the dark, we were desperate for a campfire. So we decided to venture through the pitch black night towards the nearest gas station (a solid half-hour drive away).
I don’t know what possessed me to make Joanna Newsom’s Ys one of my pre-trip impulse downloads, but there it was — locked and loaded — as I fired up the high beams for the road. The car filled with warmth, slowly but surely, as my old Chevy’s HVAC clicked and rattled, before making way for the true comfort I needed: Joanna’s amazing, fluttering vocals and the prophecy they carried.
“Cosmia” is a song like a storm, gently swirling about itself until it finally bursts with ardor. But its true heart is in its refrain: a quiet apology, offered up in vain against the dark.
Now in the quiet hour when I am sleeping, I cannot keep the night from coming in.
We had picked our camping site that week because it’s one of the best spots for stargazing in the country. Gazing up at the infinite and seeing the Milky Way with naked eyes sounded too grand and magical to be possible; I couldn’t wait. But the flip side of that coin is darkness. This was a great place to see the stars because it was dark in ways that other parks were not. High up in the mountains and miles from the nearest town, we’d driven for six hours to land somewhere completely liminal. And we did it on purpose.
first utterance by comus (1971, progressive folk)
I’m drawn to the weirder, proggier side of folk because it occupies this same liminal world. Artists like Joanna sing to us straight from the outskirts, forcing our hands to bring ink to parchment as we chart new terrain in the dark. It’s trite to compare women in music to sirens — And besides, why charge beauty with malice? But it’s hard to deny the sinister sway that a good oddball folk song carries. Uncanny beauty is the name of the game, the union of sickly and sweet.
Along these same crossroads, we meet Comus, lost beacons of the bygone 70’s prog-folk “scene”. In quotes, here, because…well…The cult following this and albums like it attracted came along years later. At the time, there were just lone travelers, hard-won fights for studio time, and battles fought for the love of the music.
Once my partner and I had acquired lighter fluid, we made our way back to our campsite, shivering with cold and exhaustion. I still felt ambitious, and the sky hung just dark enough to feel like a frightful challenge: “Come on. Make a fire. See if you can thwart me.”
So we did. Or at least, we tried to. Sending sparks into the empty sky, already rife with stars. There was no time to look at them now, however — We were hungry and cold, and the other campsites were already beginning to settle towards sleep.
After a solid half hour of effort, we finally got things crackling, meekly, and decided to try and start roasting sausages over the lukewarm flame. The first one fell in, uncooked, and the second met the same fate. My stomach growled. Let’s just use the camp stove.
By light of day, a camp stove is a fairly straightforward contraption. Once you’ve got it going, it’s pretty reliable, and the tiny pops and sizzles of whatever you choose to cook are a real human comfort within the staggering symphony of nature. But at night, when you’re standing on alert, it’s a far more clumsy affair. It’s hard to see what you’re doing, and each click of the stove feels ever so slightly too loud, especially as other campers approach curfew.
The first time we saw the bear, he was pretty polite. Who could really blame him for stopping by, when we’d left so many treats out, ripe for the taking. But later that same night, around 4am, we were met with the sounds of soft, graveled breathing mere feet from our heads. The bear was right outside the tent, sniffing our belongings to see if we were worth a bite.
peasant by richard dawson (2017, progressive folk)
A consistently less threatening, but forever festive fall tradition is the Ren Faire. Many people do it in the summertime, which I get, but it’s always suited autumn temperatures far better in my view. You can actually wear the requisite number of layers, after all, without feeling like you’re actively going to die. (That said, you can also get so drunk in broad daylight that you feel like you’re going to die all over again. They sort of encourage that behavior, in fact.)
But then again, perhaps slight discomfort is par for the course. We don’t go to the Ren Faire to luxuriate in modern comforts — We go, perhaps stupidly, to explore the nostalgia we feel for times we’ve never lived in and may never have survived. Awkward interactions settle in the air like incense smoke; nervous laughter is the price of admission. A stale, lukewarm chicken nugget is the Faire’s way of chastising you for not getting the turkey leg. I mean, come on. Look around. You should have known better.
Richard Dawson’s 2017 album Peasant is an ode to labor in all its strange, demeaning, unavoidable forms. But really, it’s an ode to laborers and the meaning-making they do in spite of their toil. The separate, grand labor that this is: To hate the occupation of one’s life and to find a way to love in spite of it. It’s seasoned with old tyme-y circumstance and flourish, traditional English sounds and sprites both historically authentic and imagined.
As a kid, one of my PA Ren Faire obsessions was the dragon-boat ride that was powered by a seemingly eager, certainly tired employee who physically propelled the ride back and forth with a rope. There’s something to be said for the gleeful sadism of children, perhaps, who always love this kind of thing more than the adults do. But isn’t that true of most amusement park fare? The kids are just less inhibited, less nauseous, and more willing to indulge in silly rides.
On each of the songs on Peasant, Dawson toys with this idea of uninhibited impulse within the context of the trials and restrictive structures of work. A prostitute strangles her bedmate and disappears into the night. A weary traveler is either killed or liberated, the narrative ambiguous. A soldier convinces himself he will never return to war, unbelieved by the audience yet fervid with hope. These stories are, on paper, vastly different from my own, but they never feel escapist. How could I be tempted to join this world, when all of its occupants are so obsessed with escaping it themselves?
…And that, I guess, is how they come to feel exactly like my own.
I still think I felt the presence of the bear’s snout, mere inches away from my face, before I heard it. A thin piece of tent-fabric all that separated us, my eyes shot open in the dark. I don’t know if, ever before, I’d been so scared that I couldn’t speak, my lungs seemingly absent from their usual home behind my shivering ribs.
After the second SNIFF there was silence, for a few short seconds — Long enough for me to remember myself, and all the classic advice about bears I’d consumed over the years. Collin and I looked at each other silently, and then began to shout and clap, turning on lanterns and trying to make our little tent as boisterous and formidable as possible. Slowly but surely, the shape of the bear - visible against the now-lit wall of the tent like a shadow puppet - grew smaller and drifted away. We spent the rest of our night shivering, meekly, in my car.
One thing was for sure: I missed the tasteful “dangers” of the Ren Faire — the curated, plague-free, escapable Ren Faire.
visiter by the dodos (2008, indie folk)
Consistently lingering on the “still fun” side of the New Weird America equation, The Dodos err goofy where our other companions so far have played the “dangerously existential” card. I was first introduced to them by a high school peer who smoked a lot of weed. And I mean a lot. And I only share that because I think it’s relevant, if you want to get the most out of this one.
With its terse song titles, and crayon-drawn cover, this one evokes the “school daze” vibe of fall pretty well, while also feeling brash and otherworldly. It makes me think of the fantasy books I loved growing up, the ever-active appeal of a poorly-planned adventure.
In fact, I used to pop this one on during my own school night “adventures”. The familiar sound turned brisk, fall walks around the local industrial park into war-torn voyages, my tattered pleather purse transformed into a bindle full of tools and breads and cheeses. I used to do this as lot as a kid: mythologize random experiences to make them a little more exciting. A favorite when I was really small was pretending (silently, mentally, insanely…) that I was in a shipwreck scene at the local wave pool. In the fall, this turned into long strolls and bike rides, all excuses to immerse myself in my favorite music.
About a year after our fateful, bear-filled camping trip, Collin bought me a giant stuffed black bear. More of a PA Wildlife educational resource than a classic teddy, he was a clear reminder of the similarly shaped bear we had met, a year prior, that had scared us witless. Now he lives, rather prominently, on a top shelf in our home. I think bears are the absolute cutest. Our past encounters have, somehow, only made this more true.
the hangman’s beautiful daughter by the incredible string band (1968, psychedelic folk)
Do you ever go through your old Tweets (xweets?) And ask yourself what the hell was running through your head when you strung them together? One of my old ones says:
'the hangman's beautiful daughter' by the incredible string band is very cozy + nice, good music to eat cereal out of the box at midnight to
Now mind you, fair traveler, I Tweeted this on July 26, 2016 at 11:50pm. At midnight? Nice try, Clare. Fall? Irrelevant.
But I include the above regardless, as evidence that this record has been with me since formative years, and has provided a comfort — a shelter and shroud, a reason to joke and to hide behind absurdity. In summer 2016, right before moving into a dorm for the first time, I was probably tweeting at 11:50pm because I was losing my mind. I still have my journals from that summer tucked away in my current bedroom, and the pages are, frankly, super sad. I was so lonely, it was a crucial part of my identity.
But this cozy little, weird-ass folk record was there for me. On the late summer almost-midnights where I felt misunderstood, and in the later years, too, as my tastes expanded and I became less lonely and more brave. I revisited it last night, for the first time in years, from my new apartment that I love. I’ve been feeling oddly lonely lately, and have had some trouble sleeping this week. And like an old friend, this album picked up with me right where we had left off. With its old, potent, sometimes dark but always charming medicine.
May the long time sun shine upon you / All love surround you / And the pure light within you / Guide you all the way on.
And that, to me, is autumn. It’s why it’s my favorite season, despite the associations with school and work and cold and stress and darkness and and and … There are also the old blankets. The old friends. The old favorite recipes. The old favorite albums.
I think that’s why we camp, in the fall, though we know the bears might be out and the air might be a bit more frigid. Why we huddle around campfires we worked hard to build. Why we romanticize sweaters and boots and coats that are really just there to protect us. The things that feel safe to us are immeasurably valuable, in an unpredictable world. And this season encourages us to celebrate safety — real or imagined, practical or not. Even forged in the face of avoidable dangers.
And with that, I like music that feels rough around the edges — a little spooky, a little homegrown, more wailing and defiant than “pretty”. A good, oddball folk singer reads like an antihero — We know their narration is unreliable, but we can’t help but sit still for their stories.
…Or maybe that’s more like a bear, actually. Frightening at first, but defiantly charming.
Thank you all for tuning in, and happy (1 week late) autumnal equinox!
This is the second year in a row where the first day of fall stood in stark contrast to the day before, heralding in autumn in this weird, trippy, magical style. I kind of love it. If shit’s gotta change…Let’s at least lean into the drama! Commitment to the bit is key!
These past few weeks have been stacked with awesome new releases — Looking forward to sharing some thoughts soon. Also! I also saw Boris live last week and openly wept. Good times.
I wish the same for you and yours. Not the weeping, but the good, good times.
Clare
Thank you. I need fall music! The senses are all so magnified with the smells of leaves, and...well...pumpkin spice everything. The ears need a treat as well! Last year it was The Band that underscored the fall. Also Skip Spence’s Oar and anything Bert Jansch.