Constructing a body of work described as “cosmic country,” Brooklyn-based indie band, Widowspeak, released their sixth album, The Jacket with the intention of telling a story. Initially fictitious, Widowspeak sought to tell the tale of a non-existent band’s illustrious rise and its inevitable fall, brought on by battles of the ego and of the heart. As more and more of Widowspeak’s own primary players– Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas– began to seep into the album, the project evolved and contorted to tell a different story.
Set in an unnamed city’s satin district, a chain-stitcher works late into the night on the album’s intro, “While You Wait.” The track was described by the band in a press release as the album’s opening credits scene: a creative mind wades through the troughs of customer service during the day, shifting to passionately burning the midnight oil come nightfall. “Those simultaneous experiences are like cities within a city; there’s always someone ending their day as someone else’s is starting,” the band stated. “It’s also about the day-to-day work that supports more creative pursuits, and how when that’s out of balance it can feel like you are on the outside looking in.”
The opening credits dissolve gently into The Jacket’s first scene: “Everything Is Simple,” an ode to both the rose-tinted glasses often donned during times of budding potential, and the harsh reality that sets in once limiting obstacles arise. “At the beginning of something, you have this very pure feeling toward it. Everything feels less complicated because you’re oriented wholly toward that potential,” the band shared. “It’s undefined, and that makes it easier to understand, because you can’t see the problems yet.” The track is dark, somber and twangy in the best way. “Everything Is Simple” devilishly threatens to let loose Thomas’s guttural guitar, which feels reluctantly but rightfully domesticated for the first half of the 10-track album.
“Salt” tells the tale of witnessing a once-fellow collaborator succeed and move onto broader horizons. The title feels ironic, as salt is often used to stave off bitterness, and this track seems riddled with cleverly cloaked resentment: “I’m happy for you, ‘cause I swore I’d be happy for you.” The poorly hidden discontent of “Salt” evolves, as emotions tend to do, into pure melancholy on the following track, “True Blue.” This track evokes that nasty, familiar feeling of nostalgia, and is dripping with the sobering reality of the present moment: “We dancеd on the weekend / ‘Cause then, we had plans / Good people are hard to find / I keep ‘em, when I can.” Thomas’s guitar dances with us on this fondly remembered weekend, painfully and beautifully strumming on our heartstrings.
“The Jacket,” the album’s peak, is representative of the ego, and the personas in which we clothe ourselves, out of protection. Our ego has a funny way of keeping us warm during times of conflict, and we wear it with pride because it is our pride. Clocking in at just over five minutes, “The Jacket” is soaked with tiny droplets from Thomas’s guitar, which slowly progress into a gently trickling stream, foreshadowing the break of the dam later on, in “The Drive.” The band describes “The Jacket” as being “about things we choose, dress up in, and adopt as symbols of who we are. Things that become objects loaded with meaning until we eventually lose or discard them, grow out of them.”
The trepidation of the imaginary band’s unraveling carries on throughout the rest of The Jacket, until reluctant acceptance is eventually forced upon us with the last three tracks on the album. In “Slow Dance,” Hamilton wistfully recounts the chain-stitcher’s 15 minutes of glory: “Slow dance in the spotlight / Just quarter of midnight, you checked the time / All of those adoring eyes on you / The dance ends and you go home to sleep.”
In cyclical form– as is life– we reach our conclusion with “Sleeper,” where our beloved protagonist returns to the city’s satin district, after the fallout: “So I’ll turn off the highway at my exit / And I’m still singing ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ / And my street still looks the same / In six months, I won’t hear your name.” The simmering, then boiling flow of The Jacket gracefully catalogs wasted potential in a way that wrenches the gut to the point of near-nausea. The saving grace of the album’s dismal concept and theme is the beautiful, sonic bow it’s wrapped in.
Words by Jessica K