Music
by Jason Bennett
Playing Friday, 2nd at The End
Ask any songwriter—and this is Nashville, so you can probably turn to the person next to you—to rattle of a list of the greatest, most influential practitioners of songcraft and you’ll probably get a predictable mix of famous names: Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, along with a few other wild cards and hometown heroes.
You probably don’t hear American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel very often, but it belongs on the list, and for proof, check his enormous catalog—20-plus years of stirring, soul-baring songs mostly chronicling love, loss, loneliness, alcoholism and desperation. You know, the basics.
“All My Love,” the lead track from AMC’s new The Golden Age, is quintessential Eitzel. “I wish that we were always high / I wish that we could swim in the sky,” Eitzel croons over a bed of shimmering, delicately plucked guitars supplied by longtime partner-in-melancholy Vudi (who also plays with home-recording wizard Ariel Pink). Harkening back to AMC classics such as “Western Sky,” the mood is tranquil, but it’s permeated by a sense of disquiet.
Elsewhere, Eitzel displays his sardonic, self-deprecating sense of humor, as on the album’s centerpiece “The Windows on the World.” Set at the bar on top of the World Trade Center sometime in the mid-’90s, the song weaves a tale of drunken revelry, as Eitzel attempts to “bore the bored barmaid”: “I said ‘You know, babe / From here you can see forever’ / She said, ‘Yeah, I know, I got it made / Here’s your fuckin’ beer / I love that look / It’s so Unabomber.’ ”
The song’s typically uneasy balance between romanticism and cold reality is rooted in truth. “All the songs kinda need to have some reference to a true event to make it feel right to me,” Eitzel says by phone from his home in San Francisco. “So that’s all a completely true story.”
Eitzel’s sad-sack devotion to ugly truths is no doubt the source of much of AMC’s appeal—the title of one of his best-loved tunes is “I’ve Been a Mess.” This may particularly be the case in England, where The Golden Age’s bright, glistening sound provoked critics to speculate that Eitzel had somehow found happiness.
“It’s funny,” Eitzel says. “The press always does that. You’re either happy or sad, and it’s a really big deal if you make an album that isn’t, like, pulling your heart from your chest. Therefore, ‘Oh my God, the Prozac works, look at that!’ ”
Happy or not, the new album has an appealingly spare and streamlined sound that may be partly due to the presence of a new, L.A.-based rhythm section, bassist Sean Hoffman and drummer Steve Didelot.
“They’re kind of that breed of super-ambitious guys that moved to L.A. to do music,” Eitzel says. “You can only really find ’em in L.A., very open-minded, smart people. I’ve worked with lots of San Francisco musicians but there’s always like, you know, the kind of small-town passive-aggressive sort of stuff. These guys are ambitious and they’re OK with that. They like being ambitious.”
Although the lineup is drastically revamped—only Eitzel and Vudi remain from the days when the group were pre-empting the ’90s Americana movement via late-’80s folk-rock classics Engine and California—the wistful, pedal-steel inflected sound is still readily identifiable as American Music Club.At the heart of that sound is Eitzel’s voice, and in a live setting, his notoriously searing, gut-wrenching delivery remains the focal point. But conjuring the raw-nerved emotions in his songs on a nightly basis does not happen easily. “Sometimes you sit there and you look at the audience and you just kinda go, like, ‘Shit, do I have to do this again?’ ” Eitzel says. “Sometimes the crowd doesn’t even wanna hear it. They just want lightweight entertainment. So you just do what you do and hope for the best.”
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