If You Wanna Move, It Has to Get Uncomfortable: Ana Egge's Between Us

In a world where we have all the tools for communication at a level we never could have dreamed of before, Ana Egge’s “Between Us” asks why we understand each other less and less.

In some ways, this question’s crystalized in the parent/child, mechanic/helper memories of "The Machine." The two characters love one another, as best they can, but they can't quite connect. The resignation in the child, that they will never know each other as well as what seems so necessary meets the resignation of the mechanic, his usefulness threatened by new technology and new ways of thinking.

What Egge does here, exquisitely, is fight against that resignation with an intense, ongoing focus on the art of communication itself. Like most great music, this starts with the collaboration that goes into building a song, a performance, and a record. This album started with a set of songs written on FaceTime in collaboration with Irish songwriter Mick Flannery. Then, Egge found a keen co-conspirator in producer Lorenzo Wolff. (To illustrate his reach, Wolff has worked with both Taylor Swift and Kanye West.) The studio collaboration interweaves an exciting array of musicians and eclectic sounds to suit Egge's own Brooklyn-by-way-of North Dakota, New Mexico, and Saskatchewan vision. At times bordering on ethereal electronica but always grounded by its plainspoken soulfulness, "Between Us" maintains a certainty of direction as coherent as its roots in Egge's development.

One way to tell that story starts with another collaboration. In 2017, Egge wrote the song "We Are One" with Nashville songwriter Gary Nicholson, an impassioned call for unity, citing those times when our common humanity overrides all other concerns. In response to the divisive political climate the whole world had been suffering, it dreamed of a time when "we finally figured out all that divides us is delusion." It asked, "Don't you want to feel, beneath your skin, that all our differences are nothing in the face of love?" The video--which shows a great cross-section of humanity on New York streets, boardwalks, and parks--revels in the beauty of our diversity and a particular joy when these strangers meet and play around on various musical instruments, tools we use to speak beyond words. [We Are One Original Video]  

In 2019, our divisions deepening, Egge recorded the song with the First Unitarian Brooklyn Choir. It's a beautiful performance, the vocal call and response growing increasingly emphatic and hopeful. [We Are One with First Unitarian Brooklyn Choir]

Then COVID-19 hit, and most of us experienced a new level of isolation and distrust. In the United States, our 2020 elections showed an electorate split in thirds--two thirds divided between two parties, the remaining third altogether alienated from the electoral process. Distrust ran so deep we couldn't even unite to fight a pandemic. 

An eloquent and necessary extension of "We Are One," Egge's "Between Us" is about all that keeps us divided, searching for what we need more than ever: unity, in the face of economic, political and environmental crises that threaten to permanently rob us of our hopes and dreams and potential. 

Key to that search is an inclusive sensibility. The Memphis-style horns that announce album opener "Wait a Minute" suggest the record's spiritual vision over lyrics that fight the chaos of the media that surrounds it. In a breakneck world, the singer asks, "Why don't we take a little time?" In a world of shouted certainties, Egge almost whispers, "I'd love to be sure, of an answer/I'd love to be sure of even one answer." The plan of action comes with its own warning: "If you wanna move, it has to get uncomfortable." [Wait a Minute video]

Tackling that sort of discomfort, the soulful, modest intensity of Egge's vocals play off the diverse instrumentation. It's in the dialectic between the vibrant details of "The Machine" and the stuttering snare and searching keys that punctuate the distance between the two characters. The quietest moments revolve around such contradictions. It's telling that the album's most decisive break up, "Don't Come Around," punctuates its narrative flight with keyboard beeps like searching radar.

The album's vision also means lots of wonderful pop hooks. "The Heartbroken Kind" pulses with sax and bass that offer sympathy for our flaws. [Heartbroken Kind video] "Be Your Drug" delights in Latin rhythms and a joyous trumpet refrain. [Be Your Drug video] "Lie Lie Lie” counters electronic distortion with searching horn and steel guitar. [Lie Lie Lie video] The sleek "Want Your Attention" features a seductive lead vocal by Brooklyn singer-songwriter J. Hoard over a shifting rhythm punctuated by sultry horns and keyboard fireworks. [Want Your Attention "video"]

At the heart of the album lies what might be called the title track, "We Let the Devil" [a line completed by the title phrase "come 'between us'"]. It's a heartbreaking march through the dark wastelands of our shredded relationships. Menacing guitar sets the tone with elegiac horns that cry out against dark, opaque heavens. It's about what everyone has experienced in recent years--an impasse, an antagonism with those we love dearly. Egge sings, "You break my heart/You're just like me/You'd lay your life for what you believe." [We Let the Devil "video"]

She feels her way forward. Conscious empathy is a part of it, as is hope for a common grieving process. The call is to "Look me in the eye so we can get somewhere." I find myself thinking of every devil who ever (to cite "Lie Lie Lie" again) sowed division "to kill and to control." That lies at the heart of our history. And Ana Egge's determined effort to make us see each other whole offers a vision of home not behind but before us.

 

Full disclosure: My introduction to this music began watching my daughter take part in the music video for "Wait a Minute," directed by Marta Renzi. Oh lucky day!

"A Town without Soul" Sets a Caravan on Its Way

 

The Fred Wickham Caravan’s debut album is about many things, but at its core is a loneliness so complete it’s delusional. In that sense, it’s a perfect record for the times we live in, particularly because it offers a way forward. The key here is community, and that means a great band like the Caravan, a diverse group of Kansas City’s best musicians so interwoven it feels wrong to try to parse the contributions.

 

But showing how the diversity adds up seems essential to the point. Wickham’s longstanding bandmate bassist Richard Burgess and drummer Matt Brahl serve up rhythms playful or jaunty or prowling or reflective (as on “One for the Road,” a soft downbeat, brushes and a bowed sustain). Goading the fearful townspeople in the title track, Fred Jr.’s mandolin and Bart Colliver’s keys comprise another ring of interplay that will take various forms again and again, trading piano for accordion and then organ. Marco Pascolini is certainly the heart behind the searching steel on “If We Ever Happened,” but it’s a fool’s game trying to tell whether Wickham or Pascolini’s imaginative guitar play is responsible for any given cry or moan—all surprising, fresh and often painfully sharp. The mix is inclusive by design, so every addition makes natural sense, from Muscle Shoals musicians (guitar and horns) on “Just Because You Can” and “Fatbird” or the Grand Marquis horns on “I Think I Just Fell In Love.”

 

That said, as strong a band album as this is, it is focused around remarkable vocals. Perhaps at its most beautiful, “If We Ever Happened” offers refrains with Colliver’s bold harmonies given an essential aura by Muscle Shoals’ Angela Hacker, a subtle approach she builds upon in the story of a woman lost on “What Happened to Me” (in contrast to the muscle she gives “Just Because You Can”). There’s an audacity to the way Fred Wickham inhabits every foolish breath of “That One Thing” and a seasoned knowingness to the warm quaver he uses to rally the room on “One for the Road.” The first of the album’s deepest gut punches, “Progress,” calls to mind John Prine, heartbreakingly insisting we believe there’s hope in momentary forgetfulness and the ability to hold it together at the sound of children playing.

“A Town without Soul” is a record haunted. It’s yearning for something lost—everything thrown away in “That One Thing,” a relationship shattered in “Breaking Your Heart,” and things the characters aren’t even sure about—“If We Ever Happened at All” or “What Happened to Me.” The town the singer must get shut of sells lies about safety and security when the singers and the band know soul saving is messy, risky, scary as hell, and, importantly, a lot of fun.

 

On this record, those singers offering “the same tired songs” aren’t simply dull, they’re edging toward dangerous. When the band shouts down “Fatbird” with a refrain of “Tweet, tweet,” it’s making a case for the power in numbers. Everyone sings in what the liner notes call the Tweety Bird choir, all by itself a raucous sound that's food for the soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Of Us: You and I Have Memories

Some kind of light by your side.

Well, Kent, this would be about the time we'd stop doing whatever we weren't supposed to be doing and settle down to sleep. That meant music. We listened to everything together, even after we wound up on two sides of a room divider, the green from the stereo the only light. We listened to a little of it all in there--Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Ozzy/Sabbath, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, The Commodores, Boston, Blondie, Rush, the Clash, Van Halen, Rickie Lee Jones and the Pretenders--everything we knew back then. 

You didn't like some of the old music punk turned me toward, and I didn't follow you far down the jam band road, but we shared embryonic bonds. Though we could never really talk about it (it wouldn't occur to us to talk about that), I think we thought through a lot of our identities in that room. We grew into the odd ducks we were out of that quiet time together. 

That time that would start just about now. I was generally in charge of the stereo (the first one was on my side, lol), and I remember picking things you'd want to hear as we worked on getting sleepy. I knew every time I could go to Ian Hunter's "You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic" and the Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station." 

And we would both always go for some Beatles. That started back when we first met, me 11/you 9, and the Beatles were the great inheritance from my older brother we bonded fullest over together. Most nights, I believe that meant "Abbey Road." 

 Last time I saw you I told you to watch the Scorsese Grateful Dead documentary. I don't know if you did. You wouldn't have learned as much from it as I would have anyway. You lived half that story. 

 But this Beatles "Get Back" thing? That would have been something to blow both our minds. (We simply would not have believed such a thing could exist back then in that room at 5809 Meadowcrest.) And though it's a movie about the "Let It Be" sessions, they play at least ten songs that would appear on "Abbey Road." And though many of those songs would be only fragments on "Abbey Road," they're equal to every other fledgling song idea during these sessions. 

So, you remember how we loved "Polythene Pam"? Well, instead of one minute woven into a suite, it becomes the whole song we always wanted it to be as kids. 

No, it's no longer. John doesn't play any more of it....

But he doesn't know he won't write it into a full song yet, and, because that's true, we hear it now always wanting to be that unwritten song.

Plotting something together

So I'm writing you in this week of my world remembering the Beatles because I want to sit on the side of the bed with you again and listen together again. I mean, I'm doing it with you in my mind now, just the way you were back then. I'm realizing you've always been there because we shared so much time in that stereo's green light. 

 One of the things I think is truly great about this new Peter Jackson "Get Back" thing is that it gets at that passion of playing music as brothers. And I don't mean because we banged around on some guitars at times. It was really the joy that made us want to do that. It was sitting in the darkness sharing that journey into sound. It was sometimes catching each other's eyes when we heard something really great. Just before we drifted off, in the dark staring at the ceiling, it was that quiet remark, a "that right there" and a "yeah" from the other side of the room. 

 And one reason that focus on the shared experience matters so much is that this movie emphasizes the community in music. Elsewhere, that last part of the Beatles career is torn up by individualistic interpretations, simply because the family was growing up and apart, a natural process. That's one way to look at all our stories, and that's what you and I were doing, playing music together from the ages of 9 to 17.

It was also the time of our greatest bonding. 

Living in this world, we lost touch some over the years, for all kinds of reasons, but we always felt the deepest love when we were together. The kind of bond you see in this band in this movie, it stands out to me as John Lennon bouncing on his toes; George Harrison asking Paul what he thinks of a line; Paul banging drums and climbing rafters, letting himself be the silliest of all; Ringo defending the band's togetherness, saying, "You don't know that; you're surmising because we got grumpy with each other. We've been grumpy for 18 months." 

That part's about grief over Brian Epstein's death. That part, like so many, reminds me of that night after Dad died--you, me and James partying in the kitchen, taking turns deejaying YouTube. Your idea, and it worked--grief made raucous and joyful.

"Get Back" is about grief, certainly, but it's about grief in such a full, round way. It's about the music and the love where I live with you now, my dear brother. I linger more and more over the meaning of those memories that will always be "longer than the road that stretches out ahead." Physically, I'm walking that road without you now, but you've never been more constant in my heart. 

Thank you for everything, Kent, and thank you for sharing all those musical journeys with me. This is the heart of what that movie shows that makes me think of you--music is about "we" and how "we" come together. In a world where "I," "Me" and "Mine" are the most popular brands, it's such a gift to have learned together the importance of that collaborative beat, that dialogue and that harmony.

Oh, and the laughter. There's so much of that here, heartfelt, filling in all the gaps...just as there was, always, with us.... Just as there is in the smiles when I think of you now.

Letting Go, Arms Open: Horror Stories and the Reason for the Season

 "This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects --no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story...."

"The Portent of the Shadow," by E. Nesbit (published 1905)

 Since I turned, say, ten and was too old to trick or treat anymore, and since my best friend Scot and I gave up throwing our own spook houses at….lemme guess….thirteen, I think my favorite Halloween activity has been handing out candy. Nothing else quite gets to the heart of the matter. I have some friends who watch trick or treaters from the window of a local haunt; that’s probably very similar.

Me, a lover of horror movies and fiction of all kinds can’t even pick out a movie. Sure, I roll the classics on the TV, but that’s just background music. Almost every horror movie director since George Romero has “Night of the Living Dead” playing on TVs in their films as a shortcut that captures fragments of a sensibility, a feel.  

At this precise moment each year, no particular story can get at the whole of what brings so many of us together. This contemplation of the thin line between life and death connects the cultures of ancient Celtics, Romans, Persians, Aztecs and Pacific Islanders. It's a sensibility many stories reach for but few maintain for long. It’s about a feeling not far removed from the feeling of Christmas Eve, rooted in ancient winter solstice celebrations. It makes sense that many of our ghost story traditions began on that colder night at the end of the year.

Some aspect of that quiet connection between worlds is what I’ve often chased when I write stories, and it started with the family ghost stories. After all, the first storyteller who had me on the edge of my seat was my grandmother. She was my Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson long before she read them to me.

This is all on my mind because, recently, I’ve been seriously trying to sell one of my novels to a publisher. Agents ask interesting questions. I’m learning how the business works. But what I want to sell doesn’t have a whole lot to do with business, and when I’m asked what genre I write none of the answers seem adequate.

Here’s the honest truth: when I’m asked to pick a genre for my fiction, and the pull-down tab says “literary” or “commercial” or “horror” or “magic realism” or “offbeat/quirky” or “contemporary” or “multicultural” or “fantasy” or “mystery” or “thriller” or “speculative,” I want to say “all of the above.” None of it seems adequate. I spend most of my time writing about multicultural and contemporary social and political issues, and those dialogues are filled with fantasy, mystery, speculation, suspense, and horror. All of that’s in my fiction and most fiction that interests me. I would love to reach a large audience (i.e. commercial), but my aims are no lesser than whatever anyone regards as “literary.” 

I’ve never stuck to one genre in my reading or my writing, but I do know my default reading for pleasure comes under the banner “horror.” Now, if only anyone agreed what that meant.... Here’s my crack at a definition for what I mean, strongly suggested by the Edith Nesbit quote above. 

My childhood play

Ghost story is my favorite term for horror, but to the extent that it’s about real-life horror, it’s also fantasy. It is a magic realism, a surrealism. I remember H.G. Wells (who gave us "The Invisible Man" and "War of the Worlds") once writing that fantasy was 98% reality. That makes sense to me. We must believe in the "real" world of the story to be awe-struck by the fantastic in that world, to feel the thin line between the worlds in the fiction and the thin line between those worlds and ours. 

That said, the unreality is crucial. Horror strives for the unreal to strike us deeper. It's unreal in a way I think allows it to engage us precisely at the subconscious levels where we might otherwise defend ourselves. If the monster tried to be real, we'd fight, explain it away or say it's unconvincing. This unreality is part of why I think horror prose is more unsettling than any movie—the realistic pretense relies entirely on the reader working with the writer to create worlds. The writer and the reader are playing make believe together. 

Many of my favorite artists are sensitive to their audience (arguably, to a fault) because they care so much about the art being more than a spectacle, instead being a dance with the audience. In the case of horror, that dance attacks your reason, your certainty, your security.

It's asking you to let go of a framework of thinking, hoping you'll find another, but meanwhile it leaves you teetering at the precipice, open, unsure. 

Personally, I think that open, unsure pause is a good way to approach whatever you do—whether it’s writing about music or listening to your loved ones. That’s a piece of what my grandma taught me when she told those old stories, and it’s a torch I carry. Halloween night, when I see kids running and jumping and screaming from house to house in anonymity compounded by darkness, they remind me of what made the night so thrilling when I was their age. I get a sort of contact high. 

Of course, there’s a thrill just opening that door. You never really know who or what’s waiting on the other side.

The beautiful grands