Perseverance and Grace
Reviewed by: Max Miller
It can be easy to forget, in this era so focused on the new and the now, that an artistic career is something that should follow the unpredictable twists and turns a life takes, and not just something to capture the oft-romanticized period of one’s twenties. Sure, this is usually a formative decade in a person’s life, when an artist begins to truly break free from their juvenile predilections. But the narrative always seems to end there, before the artist can reveal how they’ve evolved to confront life’s new challenges with their work. Dylan wouldn’t be Dylan without Highway 61 Revisited, for example, but what if everyone had moved on before he could release Blood on the Tracks?
Karen Haglof’s music career had seemingly reached that point-of-no-return where the flies buzzing around any given buzz-band find a new, more fecund pile of dung(*1). After playing guitar in hip NYC art-rock groups like Band of Susans, the Crackers and the Rhys Chatham Ensemble, Haglof went to med school and eventually joined the oncology department at venerable New York University Hospital. While she still works for the hospital to this day, she decided to return to music with 2014’s Western Holiday, her first solo album, and a far cry from some of the noisier work of her past. Now, with the release of Perseverance and Grace, Haglof continues to explore what she calls “avant-noise-roots-rock,” while challenging Fitzgerald’s famous quote, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
Contrary to Haglof’s New York background, the opening songs on Perseverance and Grace yearn for the open fields of Middle America, with “Cowgirl Clothes” and “Trouble — Won’t Say More” featuring the pounding piano and vintage guitar licks one might hear emanating from a true Nashville honky-tonk. At other times, her “avant” side shines through, like on the funky, Talking Heads-esque “Monday Under My Belt.” Tunes like “Tornado (Through the Bottleneck)” and the title cut serve to unite the groove and the twang.
An artist surprisingly analogous to Haglof is Warren Zevon. Not only did Zevon similarly split the difference between Laurel Canyon country-rock and bluesier grooves; he wrote candidly about how, as the problems in his life took on new shapes as he got older, he still confronted them with the reckless abandon of a 23-year old. On Perseverance and Grace, Haglof, too, sings about the challenges one faces later on down the road in life — much of the songwriting was inspired by the passage of her 60th birthday — but they surprisingly don’t seem too far removed from the problems that might face a singer half her age. It’s a testament to how we’re all just improvising our way through life for the first time, always waiting for things like “wisdom” or “experience” to kick in out of nowhere, while still making the same all-too-human mistakes. The difference is that Zevon lived the rock lifestyle consistently for decades and died of cancer at 56, while Haglof spent time away from music and is now the one treating cancer.
Perseverance and Grace can be a little uneven, with Haglof sometimes playing a little too close to country convention. But overall, the record captures the joy of someone reconnecting with music and embracing being alive in a way few records do. It’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t atrophy just because life gets in the way sometimes. After all, what is art if it isn’t mucked up a little by experience?
Rating: Bad-ass
*1 “Dung” not being a reflection of quality in this metaphor, even though sometimes that’s true, too.
