Liner Notes

On Transatlantic Light by Will Hermes

I’ve been obsessed with reading liner notes since I learned to read! That’s where you find the good stuff - the insights, the clues, the insider knowledge into the artists you love and the artists you don’t yet know. And you learn about other related artists - I learned about so many male country stars from reading the liner notes of female country stars of the 1970s like Sammi Smith and Loretta Lynn and Tanya Tucker, whose albums I bought from bargain bins in second hand stores just cos they had cool covers, and the liner notes sent me off in search of Kris Kristofferson and George Jones and Conway Twitty. I learned about producers like Owen Bradley, about piano players like Floyd Cramer. I learned about jazz musicians and venues and songwriters from reading Peggy Lee liner notes - I learned about worlds I didn’t know and words I hadn’t yet learned and music I knew I wanted to hear, based on the vivid descriptions on the backs of the records I’d bought.

So when I teamed up with Impressed Records and discovered one of their signature moves is is accompanying essays/liner notes for the records they press, I was excited.

And I was beyond over the moon when Will Hermes, whose reviews and writing I have admired for a very long time, agreed to write the liner notes for Transatlantic Light, my new album with the Great Beyond, now available everywhere.

You can read below - and read regular missives here from Will Hermes🌹

Lo Carmen’s a lifer.

Singer, songwriter, author, actress, painter, podcaster. A generous and seemingly tireless culture worker who understands that artistic expression in service to connecting with kindred souls on this glorious and terrible journey of ours is one of the higher callings humans can answer to. If you’ve never read her Substack, Loose Connections, you should. It goes deep on creative process, music history, food, friends, birds, waitressing, New York City ghosts, dying on stage, and more. She’s got a book, too (Lovers Dreamers Fighters). Girl can write.

Of course, you’re reading this because she can also make music. She does that decidedly in the present, though she regularly conjures the past. Or pasts, I should say, as she’s not what I’d call a “retro” artist, except in her erudition. You hear these pasts in her voice, a soft-focus whisper full of mystery and intimacy that feels like the imploring of a ghost, or a new friend well past closing time. Those pasts are also in the music, a holy-glowing dreamscape of smoke-clouded guitars, loping basslines and tantric drums that channel a history of sound recordings, from delta blues to chiaroscuro surf reveries, haunted pop ballads to modern bloodied valentines — the kind of songs that document ache and regret and subsequent actions that abhor the vacuum those emotions leave.

a holy-glowing dreamscape of smoke-clouded guitars, loping basslines and tantric drums that channel a history of sound recordings, from delta blues to chiaroscuro surf reveries, haunted pop ballads to modern bloodied valentines

Those pasts dwell in her words too, of course: plainspoken poetry with touches of noir, sometimes flickering with verses of other songs, because language evolves through songs, adding weight to words and phrases. Take a letter, Maria. Come to me slowly. I’m not a rock, you’re not an island. “I’m the sum of all pasts,” the singer sings in “Never Love a Singer,” a (somewhat?) tongue-in-cheek mea culpa leavened with punchlines and backing vocals by Robyn Hitchcock, a fellow lifer who knows that comedy and tragedy can coexist in song just fine, as they do in life.  

For example: there’s a recurring moment in “Epic Encounter,” a slow-motion, iridescently cinematic waltz whose gloriously self-possessed mating ritual reminds me of eerie late-20^th century films like Paris, Texas and Blue Velvet. It also reminds me of Lou Reed, when he off-handedly invokes a Stutz Bearcat on “Sweet Jane.” When Lo sings “shake a tail feather, too” she’s reanimating an arcane expression in a new age, and there’s a warm ruefulness in how she sings it. It’s a tiny sultry sinewy prayer for things that have faded, are fading, burning, burnt out — but that she and perhaps we refuse to forget or let go of. Like the spirit of certain types of rock’n’roll, or soul, or country music.

These things aren’t going to disappear on Lo’s watch.

And you can hear plenty of this spirit here. This is an album that instructs the listener — compels, really — to take a breath, to let go, to reconnect forgotten neural pathways and perhaps create new ones. From the opening guitar figures that spiral up like hookah smoke on “Fix Your Heart,” through the finale “Just Go Along For The Ride,” a meditation on the human expedition, and the final leg across the River Styx. Lo sings with shivers that echo Sam Worrad’s heavy guitar drapery, framing a stage set for a tale of a figurative road that goes on forever — shivering yet fearless, at least in the act of art making.

Like I said, Lo is a lifer. She’s an actress who survived the potentially-lethal head trip of an outsized early success in film, slipping off to build a career on her own terms, not unlike the arc of Will Oldham (a fellow traveler she recorded with not long ago). She wanted to get Nashville high, so she did. She wonders still, one imagines, who will shake her black tambourine. And as I see it, her work advocates looking for wisdom and samadhi wherever you can find it. In the eyes of a lover; the grip of a one night stand, or a last stand; the rise of a chord progression; or a punk koan scrawled on a bathroom wall. And her work may spur a realizing that it’s not the thing itself, but the search, the acting, the creating, that contains that wisdom. The doing. Fix your heart or die.

Will Hermes

(author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire and Lou Reed: The King of New York)

There’s also a wonderful interview with Will on Sari Botton’s Oldster Magazine that you can read here:

This is 63: Rock Journalist Will Hermes Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

When I received Will’s words, I was overjoyed to discover that not only did they bring the music to life on the page but there were words I didn’t know and references and concepts I had to explore to fully understand.

Can you guess what they were?

I also felt perhaps the most understood I have ever felt in words, when Will wrote ‘Lo wanted to get Nashville high, so she did’. I might have to use it as my new artist bio.

You can find ‘Transatlantic Light’ on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you stream…. And you can still purchase a gorgeous slab of pink vinyl with liner notes and lyrics and photos (by Katerina Stratos & Derby Chang) from Impressed Recordings.

Photo by Vinny Ramone - Sam & I played songs live and chatted on Vinny’s radio show The Outpost last week - you can listen here.

I also had a great conversation with Nathan Jolly on his podcast Listen Carefully, which is an absolute treasure trove of thoughtful interviews with musicians. I listen to it often while I walk so it was quite surreal to be on the other side of the headphones!

Yesterday Ken & Sam & I went into the FBI Radio studios to have a free ranging conversation & play some music with cultural legend DJ Jack Shit on his show Jack Off - yeah we’ve been getting around! You can listen here.

It’s very exciting to have this album out, it’s been a long, slow process and seemed like an impossible magic trick to pull off for a while there…. I’m so happy it’s out there in the world now and I’d be even happier if you take a listen.

As Big Star would say, thank you friends! X