Richard Buckner was born in 1964 into what he calls a "straight household" in Fresco, California. Travel was a way of life for the Buckner family. His mother was a bookkeeper but his father fixed truck tyres (a tyrebuster), work which meant that they constantly upped sticks to relocate at various points of Highway 99.
With this rootless ,yet respectable, upbringing Buckner's albums are, not unexpectedly, heavily steeped in travel motifs. His songs evoke a vivid and compelling image of an individual in drift. They are laden with downbeat reflections on love in a faithless country.
The lack of light in his songs is matched by his physical appearance. One journalist described him onstage at a New York club in 1996 looking as if he had "stepped out of some smoky, coal lined hole in the Appalachians".
Yet despite the inescapable mood of tortured melancholy his music is strangely liberating. There's a certain twisted romance in his desolation and it's oddly reassuring to know that the gravity of someone else's situation outweighs your own. Leonard Cohen once wrote that one of the functions of poets is to question and even to hate the world on our behalf. Often, they inhabit a place you don't want to go to, but it's one which draws you in as if to experience the suffering by proxy. The breakdown of Buckner's marriage and reports that he often sleeps in the back of a pick-up help fuel a popular myth of the poet as one who suffers for his art, who is prepared to sacrifice the comforts to do justice to his creative instincts.
The truth and integrity of Buckner's approach to songwriting is undeniably at odds with commercial aspirations. All the more bizarre, then, that he scooped a big label deal with MCA after the critical acclaim of his first album - 'Bloomed' . With his second release - 'Devotion And Doubt' - it's easy to imagine MCA's executives pacing up and down muttering "I don't hear a hit single here". In truth it's hard to guage what they were expecting as his debut hardly gave much hope of crossover success. Inevitably he was ditched after one further album ('Since') and returned to an Indie label. It's the lovelorn strand of Buckner's music that forms the basis of his fourth and most accomplished album - The Hill.
The Hill was his first release for Overcoat Records and a positive 'up yours' to any who have trouble stomaching his distinctive brand of bleakness. The whole is mixed to make a single 34 minute track that pretty well obliges the listener to listen to it in one sitting. By any benchmark it is an exceptional album. The raw traditional elements come with a distinctly contemporary edge and in the process it encapsulates all that is essential about Alt.Country.
Given the fact that relationships gone sour or cut short are such a recurring theme in Richard Buckner's songs, it's easy to understand what drew him to the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters. Here too the connection between fated romance and premature death is strong.
Masters wrote his most famous work in 1915. It contains over 200 free verse monologues in which dead citizens of a fictitious town (inspired by Lewistown, Illinois) reflect on their past lives. These are quite literally voices from the grave through which Masters focuses primarily on the ironies, sordidness and hardships of existence.
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Choosing the Spoon River Anthology as source material acknowledges the ghosts of America's 'hidden' history, identified in musical terms by another key anthology, that of Harry Smith in 1952. The poems are moving homages of regret and retain a modern quality by being essentially humanistic in tone. Buckner sets nine of them to music and there are short instrumental versions of another nine. He is ably abetted by the subtle yet highly evocative musicianship of Calexico's Joey Burns and John Convertino.
The work is best exemplified through the most poignant section - a treatment of 'Elizabeth Childers' where twin themes of birth and death are tragically intertwined:
"O, child you died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death".
Far from pitying the child who perishes with her mother, the stillbirth is viewed as a blessing, a way to avoid the anguish, sickness and sorrow in the world. It is the mother's voice we hear, full of maternal affection yet blighted by a fatalistic vision of what the future would have held for her child had she survived:
"The long, long way that begins with school days,
When little fingers blur under the tears
That fall on crooked letters".
The vulnerablity of childhood is beautifully expressed in such lines - the "crooked letters" vividly brings to mind the early attempts at writing. Literacy is usually connected to positive notions of self expression and understanding. Here there is no proud parent looking on nor any glimmer of optimism for a harsh world in which where nature itself is "eyeless" and the "cup of Love [is] poisoned". The poem concludes with the bleak declaration that "Death is better than Life!"
Though the album's source may come from the past there can be no mistaking the present day sensibility that informs the work. 'The Hill' serves as a reminder of how America's rich literary heritage can feed so effortlessly into its musical traditions to show the modern day relevance.
Artists of the calibre of Richard Buckner ensure that the heartache and pathos that has haunted all genuine folk and country music since the early 1900s is still just as powerful today.
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