Goodbye Ceremony is the first Spiritual Family Reunion album to see the light of day, but—if the title’s prophetic—it may be the last. And that would be a damned shame, because songwriter/vocalist/pianist Patty LeMay does compelling things with mood, realism and fantasy.
“Chances are, the way I feel about trying to do music and how hard it is, maybe it is a goodbye ceremony,” she says. “It may be ‘goodbye—this is the last thing.’ ”
The five-year journey to Goodbye Ceremony was mostly uphill, through two uncompleted recordings—one with Lambchop’s Mark Nevers—money shortages, a lineup about as static as a winding creek, marathon recording sessions and whittling down 20-plus tracks.
Suffice to say LeMay undertook serious labors—even adopting a new approach to singing—for her heavyhearted songs. “I guess I kind of changed my style some, because the dreamier and prettier it is, it’s like there’s this glass ceiling of your voice,” she says. “I felt like my words weren’t being heard.”
Spiritual Family Reunion traipse through torchy, haunted country—colored by deeper hues of Southern rock and soul (a little more variation would be welcome, since several songs feel very similar)—while LeMay sings unflinching tales about destructive human tendencies played out in tiny
mountain towns.
“I think of myself as a young person who has had a lot of terrible experiences that have made me unsurprised at anything that could or would happen—and left me with nothing but the plain truth,” she says.
Two of the most veristic songs come in the middle of the album. First is the sighing guitar ballad “Your Famous Face.” (“I wrote [that] as a world-weary, Johnny Cash-esque commentary for a friend who was dying of drug addiction.”) Then there’s “Shane”—a song about a tragic, mysterious young death (à la Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe”) that comes off like a bruised gospel number.
Still, the band’s repertoire isn’t so sobering that it squeezes out imagination. “Sparkle Across the Water”—first introduced as dirty country-rock and later sleepily reprised—is thoroughly whimsical.
“There’s all those folk songs that ask a question and nobody answers it,” says LeMay. “So [this song] asks a question and the answer is ‘sparkle across the water.’ It’s not really an answer. But if somebody asks me too direct questions, I’m known for not giving a real answer.”
It’s no surprise that LeMay cites recordings made between 1962 and 1972 as influences, considering the album’s hazy-edged, analog vibe—courtesy of generous reverb and Paul Niehaus’ and Mason Vickery’s steel guitar playing—and the lack of current cultural references in song lyrics. Then there’s her notion about the lost art of singing.
“It’s more than just singing in tune,” says LeMay. “I mean, it’s important to a degree, but if one must sing out of tune then I would hope that I could hear the heartbreak in their voice. People are not singing with emotion anymore, I think, because they don’t really know how. Then the phrasing is so important. Like, for instance, [Silver Jews frontman] David Berman has phrasing—it’s not just his words.”
Berman is a friend and advocate of LeMay’s. He even campaigned to get her signed to the Silver Jews’ label, Drag City (it’s out on Tract instead), and supplied the album title. “I had a name, but I don’t feel like I’m very good at entitling things,” she says. “[Berman] emailed, ‘I’ve looked up Goodbye Ceremony on Google and there’s nothing.’ ”
