JOEY NOVACHECK "NATURAL" REVIEW
Album art for Natural.
Joey Novacheck - Natural
Attention
When it comes to songwriting and mood-setting, Joey Novacheck is a natural.
I mean it too; not to just open on a pun and not back it up. Natural is great at putting you into a place with minimal and typically warm instrumentation. While there is certainly variety within the album, generally this is an album for relaxing, sitting somewhere comfortable, and simply listening. Joey primarily uses guitar, piano, a droning synth tone, and plenty of his signature banjo stylings. The minimal sound draws you to the vocal delivery and the lyrics, which are worth the attention.
Presence
Two songs that I think highlight this engrossing presence would be “Feed” and “Pando.” Let’s start with “Feed.” This song stays for six minutes with only an arpeggiated guitar and spoken word vocal delivery. During the six minutes, Joey is fine with having open sections of only the guitar line, including the last two minutes of the song. On paper, that sounds like something that would overstay its welcome, but for me, it doesn’t. I’m just as happy listening to it as Joey seems to be playing it. I would compare the guitar line to Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe” or “Guaranteed,” but it still very much has its own sound and energy. As for the lyrics of the song, Joey is exploring the story of the Two Wolves: the wolf (or dog) you feed wins. Despite the peacefulness this song has musically, Joey twists this aphorism into a morbid story of the “hateful” dog starving and dying, describing in detail this dog’s death through “feeding” the “good” dog. Everything about this song is as fresh as it is fascinating.
Another highlight that feels just as engrossing as “Feed” is “Pando.” Joey adorns this song with not only another minimal guitar line but also a piano and some sort of bright synth tone that reminds me of a really emotional scene of a dramatic movie. Joey repeats the chorus of “Tall and together” and describes trees in a general tone with the message of unity in the perspective of a grove of trees. Amazing.
Outside of those highlights, this album is filled with a variety of sounds, subjects, and instrumentation. While I was saying that the album is generally sincere and inviting, there are darker moments too. “Society of the Heavy Feather” is about a death worshipping society that also puts some perspective on the concept of living. “Five Minutes Later” questions culpability and consequence in a way that is an assault similar to the negative self-talk that might come on a stressful night at 3 AM. Joey cuts with hard-hitting lyrics like: “Remember the weird kid you were mean to? It doesn’t matter, they remember you.”
Holism
Personally, this album gives me a lot to think about when it comes to existence and nature. In a time of chaos, I think it’s nice to have something as slowed down and meditative as Natural. In an era where so many artists are focused on singles, it’s refreshing to have an album this cohesive, where all the songs seem to be working together. Joey isn’t afraid to talk about hard concepts like war, death, and religion. With all these concepts, I don’t feel lectured at any moment, but rather like I am exploring these concepts with Joey as he’s digesting them himself.
As for what the album is about, this album is very holistic or even about the concept of holism. The album is bookended with “Blind God (East)” starting the album and “Blind God (West)” ending it. Both these songs have the chorus of “I saw once,” with “and then I saw it all” sometimes completing the phrase. Natural really is musing about encompassing topics such as religion, life, and… well… nature, of course. “Tall and Skinny” is one song counterpointing themes of the album by being about the sort of disconnect we have on computers while also countering the chorus of “Tall and together” from “Lando.” But we have songs about death worshippers. We have a religious hymn. We have songs about connections between people as well as disconnects. These are big concepts. These are varied concepts with varied perspectives in different songs. But it all does fit together. Joey manages this through holistic songwriting tying motifs and themes together between songs as well as consistent uses of instrumentation creating a general vibe for the album that gets us back to that place of just sitting somewhere, maybe with a nice cup of tea on the porch, and purely listening.
The composition will naturally (that’s only my second strike on that one) draw you in. This album has a lot to say, and it says it well. Well worth your time.
(Melodic Noise): How are you?
(Joey Novacheck): Doing good. Coming out from under my rock a little bit. It’s been weird because we had a baby, so we had to be doubly careful with covid, more than your average bear, and then baby came, and now there’s no going out because we have to take care of the little one. So it’s been weird and wild, but it’s been fun and full of love, so it’s good.
(MN): Totally. Covid has been… pretty different, and I bet the baby will make things pretty different too. Anyways, with Natural, let’s get into it. Let’s start out with nature as a concept. What drew you to that as a concept? And how do you define natural?
(JN): So, reading a lot of the ancient philosophers I’ve been into lately, the stoic school of philosophy, in particular, is very focused on what is natural for a human being or like trying to define human nature and the natural world and how does the world work and how do we fit into it as good humans. And so they had a lot of theorizing about, like, how we fit in, and I was sort of trying to explore that a little bit because it was a new concept for me, and I think I was wrestling with it more than I was preaching it because I was chewing on these ideas that were new to me. I think a lot of times with pandemics and police violence and politics, I think it’s easier to see chaos in the world, but with the stoics, they saw a sort of natural order in the way that the world worked and the ways in which the world disappointed us is also a feature of the world. Some will say “that’s not a feature, that’s a bug,” and stoicism is like Buddhism in that suffering is a feature of human life and not a bug. As you can tell with the long-winded answer, I’m still chewing on the concept.
(MN): I definitely got that sense with the album, that it’s not so much trying to give off a certain message as much as it is exploring those concepts. Going off of that a little bit, I noticed a lot of exploration on religion. Do you want to talk about that a bit? How religion plays into the album?
(JN): Yeah. Um… I think there are parallels between philosophy and religion. I don’t know what all of them are… I mean, I think you can say religion is for fanatics, and philosophy is for elites who work in some fancy school. But there’s a lot of shared space in that Venn diagram. The stoics use God interchangeably with nature. They use gods and goddesses to illustrate what they’re trying to get across. And I think religion has always been a little bit interesting to me. I think most people in my socioeconomic background are put off by organized religion, but there is a baser part of me that is interested in things that I don’t really understand.
(MN): And there’s a lot to explore there, too. I also got a more analytical or exploratory sense of writing with it. To go into one song in particular, The Society of the Heavy Feather” seems to explore religion in a different sense in that it’s like a death worshipping cult? Is that right?
(JN): Yeah that’s sort of how I’ve thought about it. So I’m glad it came off in that way. So like, religion can be like a mean place, and the Society of the Heavy Feather is a mean sort of callous religion about, like, death and dying, and they’re sort of accusatory of people who live their life as if they’re not going to die. And that very much comes through in a lot of ancient philosophies. I mean, a lot of ancient philosophers were just like really petty dudes that would just shout at people like “You’re gonna die! Don’t you know that?” and like they would just kind of be jerks that some people don’t understand the way they do, and that’s sometimes a put-off-ish sort of thing, but in a death worshipping religion like that, they might have a sense that outsiders don’t understand them. So, it’s sort of like, evil, but I also sort of vibe with the messages because I don’t think there’s anything good about looking away from death or trying to ignore that inevitability.
(MN): For sure. The song definitely gives a lot to think about. Another song I wanted to talk about was Feed. That one was a highlight for me both in the songwriting structure as well as concept. Can you tell a bit about the two dogs in the song?
(JN): Yeah so there’s a saying I learned about on the Duluth lynchings. There’s a memorial to the men who were lynched, and one of the quotes is something like “there are two dogs in my heart. One is evil and one is good,” and someone asks “Which one wins?” and he says “the one that I feed,” which implies there’s good and evil in all of us. And it’s easy to feed the unjust dog, or we can do the work on ourselves to make sure the good dog is fed.
(MN): I guess on top of that, you don’t just use that aphorism, but you kind of turn it on its head, and you make it kind of morbid, in that in being a good person, you starve the other dog. So what inspired that idea?
(JN): I think that the evil dog is a part of our nature, and to get back to that whole natural concept, evil is a natural reality, and pruning that in some ways is unnatural. Like, it’s hard to remind myself “I can do better, I shouldn’t be thinking XYZ,” and that’s not how mindfulness is supposed to go, necessarily. But it’s a constant challenge of even when you’re feeding the right dog, it can be tempting to go back to the other dog if you’re hanging out with your old high school friends or something.
(MN): So, there were two covers in the album. They both fit surprisingly well. But where did they come from? Did you happen to be learning them? Or did you place them in the album intentionally?
(JN): With the Peter Gabriel song, that was one I just heard on the radio, and I thought it would be a cool banjo song. Then when I learned it, I realized that it has something to do with philosophy, religion, and self-improvement and such. So that was a happy accident. The other cover… I don’t know if it was a Doc Bogs song originally, but he’s sort of a person that a lot of old folk heads point out as like a founding father of popularizing old-time mountain music. So I was sort of trying to emulate his style. It’s another religious song from the ’50s that originally I thought was just some old fat white dude talking about how he found God, and I’m not that interested in organized religion from the south. But I think the message of “leave it there” related a lot to the mindfulness sort of concepts on the album. And another song that’s just a lot of fun to play on banjo.
(MN): I showed the album to my mom, and she was very impressed. I think you found a new fan in my mom. She was also very impressed with how you managed to fit everything together: songwriting mixed with storytelling and how that blends with the music too. So how did you approach that?
(JN): So, like, trying to have each song sort of like in conversation with one another? Is that kind of what you mean?
(MN): I think it was more like how did you fit the music to match the lyrics? But I’m also interested in that too.
(JN): I think when I’m writing songs, at least with this album, I come up with ideas at work, and then I punch ideas in my phone, and usually, I forget about those ideas until I come up with a banjo riff that I think a song could be written about, and I sort of scroll through those ideas for whatever sort of feels right. So it’s not a perfect process because I think there are certain ideas that maybe fit more with the core thesis of the album, but I just never found a good banjo riff for them, so they never made it onto the album. So pretty unscientific, just keep playing banjo until I find a riff that fits into X or Y ideas I came up with. Then in terms of the order of songs or how songs fit together, I try to get the core message of what I’m trying to get across, and I think I start more certain, and then it becomes more doubtful. Because there are songs like “Heavy Feather” that are about a religious group that are pretty unified in their message, but then there are songs like “Feed” where I’m trying to follow all these doctrines, but like damn, it’s hard. And there is ambiguity, but I think living in ambiguity is good. I don’t know if that really answers the question or is quite what you’re looking for.
(MN): I mean, process and writing style is always sort of a slippery subject to try to retroactively talk about because it’s sort of an abstract thing.
(JN): And retroactively is probably the keyword because I had probably half the album set, and then a few other songs before I settled on Natural when I had to get rid of some songs and then add some new songs. In the end, I had a few covers to sort of add some padding I guess.
(MN): Well personally, while I think it covers a lot of ideas, I think you did a good job of fitting it all together.
(MN): What are your thoughts about the future of My Mom’s Guitar? Now that we’re post vaccines, I know that Jae [Yates] has been a pretty important part of My Mom’s Guitar. I know that you labeled this album as a Joey Novacheck album without Jae. I’m just kind of curious of what might befall My Mom’s Guitar in the future.
(JN): So me and Jae have referred to him and I as My Mom’s Guitar. So even though the first couple albums were My Mom’s Guitar and just me, when I think of My Mom’s Guitar now, I think of me and Jae writing sort of spooky songs. So when I put out albums during covid, I didn’t call them My Mom’s Guitar because I didn’t think it captured what I think of now with My Mom’s Guitar with me and Jae captures. But we are hoping to get back into practicing and rehearsing and hopefully recording stuff.
(MN): Yeah, you started an album, right?
(JN): Mmhmm.
(MN): With Josh [Wirtanen]?
(JN): Yeah, and I think we had 5ish songs that we had recorded and Josh was going to spearhead mixing. So hopefully, we’ll get back into that. But in a week and a half or so, Jae and I are going to get back into the same place and get practicing again.
(MN): So I think that’s all for me to cover. Are there any shout-outs you wanted to get out?
(JN): Shoutouts I suppose I might say Charlie Parr, The Tallest Man On Earth, Kaia Kater, Lianne La Havas
Listen to Natural on Bandcamp
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Review by: Lucas Kurmis, Writer @KurmisTheFrog
Edited by: Eric Martin, Writer/Assistant Editor @eamartin95