by Tom Noonan
Drew Holcomb sounds content. Not just on his newest release, Medicine, which was released in January and recorded, as always, alongside his sturdy stable of “and” collaborators known as “the Neighbors”, but also in the way he talks about the music he’s making right now. “Like many artists, I spent most of my twenties making my work out of a place of trying to find my voice,” he tells me, “and I have done that progressively. But on Medicine I think it is the first album that feels completely of my voice and my vision for the kind of music I have always wanted to make.”
As far as songwriting institutions go, Holcomb remains an anomaly: a sincere Tennessean aestheticist who also takes cues from iTunes Top-Seller lists. His work has soundtracked as many network TV shows as, and I’m making an educated guess here, wilted dawns following weeklong benders. He makes songs familiar enough that you let them in, like old friends you’ve forgotten almost everything about, until eventually they become something wholly original and rewritten. Medicine is made up exclusively of songs like this, ones that only sound overly familiar so that they can be.
Just about every song on the record is a love song, in that each of them is about love, and Holcomb sells the majority with a calm bewilderment. It’s as if he’s already realized he doesn’t have the right words but keeps trying anyway. For 12 songs, Holcomb’s never quite in control of his emotions, even opening the album on its most wobbly line, “She was a good companion/Eyes like the Grand Canyon”. He’s trying to explain an impractical feeling by naming all the things that feeling makes him see, a free association test strapped inside a folk lyric. Unsurprisingly, it’s the anxiety attached to the imagery that you end up connecting with the most.
That anxiety stems largely from a conflation of love, which, I’d argue, is the main conflict at the center of Medicine, where Holcomb routinely writes about his family in the exact same language he uses to write about his music. In most cases, the two are interchangeable, like on “The Last Thing We Do” where he sings, “How long have I loved you?/How long have I told you the truth?/We’re gonna try and make it better/If it’s the last thing we do”. It’s extremely hard to point to his subject in that line; is it his marriage or the fans coming out for his upcoming tour? Trying to figure out the answer to that question is part of why you keep returning to the record.
But, because I had the opportunity and because the world is much easier to comprehend in terms of unreasonable binaries, I went looking for an answer and asked him about whether or not this conflation that occurs across the entire record is intentional. “I don’t always know which one I am talking about,” he answers. “I think they are intertwined. The love we share for other people, while sometimes romantic, is certainly not limited to that. I once heard Jeff Tweedy from Wilco interviewed about why people go to concerts, and the basic gist of his answer was that people go to concerts to be reminded they are not alone. Music has a way of saying ‘me too’ to everyone, even strangers.”
Once you know that Holcomb’s writing on Medicine is informed at its base level by this Tweedy conflation, the record really starts to take shape, thanks in large part to some sudden and cathartic harmonies Holcomb shares with Ellie Holcomb, an ex-Neighbor and current life collaborator (wife). When I asked him about his wife’s contributions, he says that the abruptness was always the plan.
“It was great on this album to pick and choose which songs we would have Ellie sing on,” he says. “Since she left the touring band, we have stretched out in some different directions, which made for more songs without her presence, so yes, those ones she is a part of are more distinct than previous records. Ellie has an incredible way of singing around and alongside me, like on ‘Tightrope’, when she comes in at the perfect moment of ‘Wherever you go,’ and all of a sudden, as the narrator, I am no longer alone. So the song doesn’t seem like a pipe dream but a reflection of an actual relationship. I hope people see it [that way], because I feel like that is what is happening too.”
The song he citing there, “Tightrope”, is Classic Holcomb, a surface cut that’s equal parts Townes Van Zandt and Benjamin Gibbard, until it’s not. What he doesn’t mention is the weary guitar solo that moves like a 3 am train and separates the body of the song from its heart, and that Ellie’s voice hums in behind his before becoming the gust of wind that blows him over. But there’s a reason, I think, that he doesn’t really have to mention those kind of specifics anymore. This is what happiness sounds like.
Drew Holcomb will be playing with the Neighbors at World Café this Friday, March 27th. Doors open at 7:00. Of the venue, Holcomb tells me, “Our first show [in Philadelphia] was years ago in the small upstairs room at World Café, and we had no idea if anyone was going to show up. We got there and it was sold out, and we had no idea how that happened. It was literally our first time in the city. So this venue and this city have a special place for us because it was a night that put a lot of gas in our emotional tanks. We are looking forward to being back.”
So come out, and bring some emotional oil. Already conflated, if possible.
