The music of Richard Buckner

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WSWS : Arts Review : Music

The music of Richard Buckner

By Hiram Lee
4 August 2007

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On July 23, singer-songwriter Richard Buckner gave a remarkable performance at The Dame in Lexington, Kentucky. Buckner, who has amassed a relatively small but dedicated following over the past decade, drew a surprisingly large crowd for a concert that began late on a Monday evening and lasted until one o’clock the next morning. Joining him on the bill were Cartright, These United States and Six Parts Seven, a group performing slow, meditative instrumental music. Six Parts Seven also served as Buckner’s backing band, transforming themselves into an impressive country-rock outfit in the process.

Buckner’s work is rooted in the tradition of “old-time” music, a catch-all phrase typically used to describe pre-war folk or country music such as that collected by Harry Smith in his famous Anthology of American Folk Music released on the Folkways record label. But Buckner is by no means a nostalgic musician content to copy the trends of the past. He has built on these traditional foundations over the course of his career incorporating rock and other contemporary styles, always reinventing himself and defying popular opinion in regard to what can or should be done in a given musical genre.

The singer opened his set at The Dame with a solo acoustic performance of “The Tether and The Tie” from his most recent album, Meadow (2006). It was clear from the start of the performance that Buckner’s voice, often described as gruff or containing a “twang,” may not be polished, but makes for a deeply expressive instrument.

Following “The Tether and The Tie,” Buckner was joined onstage by the members of Six Parts Seven. Throughout the concert, one song led directly into the next or arose from a swell of noise created by looping or delay effects that were used as a bridge between each number. The music was continuous. Buckner never spoke to his audience and only rarely seemed to open his eyes.

While the set was generally excellent, a few songs stood out as worthy of special mention. “Town,” another track from Meadow and one of the singer’s more forceful rock songs, provided the band with an excellent opportunity to stretch out and reveal their talents. “Boys, The Night Will Bury You,” which appeared on the 1998 album Since as a short song sung only with electric guitar as accompaniment, was here transformed into an exciting full band piece. The verses were sung with Buckner accompanying himself on electric guitar as on the album, then as a menacing punctuation to the last lines of each verse, the band joined in with intense drumming and droning guitars. In this new arrangement, dark lyrics like “there’s things out there that’ll bend your bones” found an ideal musical backdrop. It was the highlight of the evening.

“Raze” showed off Mr. Buckner’s incredibly clean finger-picking style on guitar. The lyrics of “Raze” were haunting, with the hopeless narrator of the song saying, “Pour your poor self out and milk your spirit down, but what are you gonna do in another year or two but groove a new rut in another town.” With no prospects for the future and finding themselves unable to fulfill their potential, the characters in “Raze” will “light up the sky with the look in our eyes and a lifetime left to kill.”

The concert ended, appropriately enough, with a solo performance of “Fater” and its refrain of “leave and travel well.”

Richard Buckner, born in 1967, first began playing music seriously while in college. The emergence of his musical ambitions coincided with the growing popularity of the increasingly affordable multitrack cassette recorder, which provided a way to record music semiprofessionally at home. While home-recording equipment had been available for decades, the newer compact machines of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which recorded directly to commercially available cassette tapes, allowed musicians not affiliated with a record label and without major funding to overdub instruments and edit their music properly, all without interference or censorship. Buckner spent a great deal of time honing his craft on such equipment, experimenting and growing as an artist. Many songs recorded with his 4-track and 8-track cassette recorders would find their way onto his albums.

Also taking shape at this time was the alt-country, or alternative country, movement. Young musicians in groups like Uncle Tupelo, The Jayhawks, or Old 97’s, influenced by classic country artists as well as punk and “independent” rock musicians, began to combine their interests to create their own music which fell outside the mainstream of both country and rock. When he emerged, Buckner would come to be considered one of the major talents of the alt-country genre and continues to be lumped into this category even as his work has progressed well beyond its confines.

After spending some time as a street musician in San Francisco, Buckner found his way onto a small record label. This label would release his first album, Bloomed (1994). Produced by the great multi-instrumentalist Lloyd Maines who also performed on the record, Bloomed made for an extraordinary debut. Opening with the lines, “I’ve been stunned, and I’ve been turned, I’ve been undone and burned. I saw you as the answer to years of blue and wonder,” the song launched Buckner’s career through detailing the lives of primarily working class characters who had found more defeats than victories in life and whose emotional world had not survived intact. These characters frequently obsessed over the past, finding little hope in the future. In his treatment of such figures, Buckner is always compassionate and, though sometimes dreary, is never condescending or cruel.

Signing next with major label MCA, he released Devotion and Doubt (1997) and Since (1998), impressive albums that saw Buckner grow even more as an artist. But relations with the label were difficult, and he was dropped in the middle of a tour, his promised funding for future dates withdrawn.

In a 1999 interview with Oregon’s Willamette Week, Buckner discussed his experience with record labels: “I’m not sure if I want to go to a label at all. I’m not sure what I want to do. I don’t trust anyone anymore. I mean, as far as independent labels, I never got paid off from Bloomed and still feel used from that, so, I don’t think it has to do with a major or minor label. It has to do with the overall thievery of the classic record company-artist relationship.”

Whatever his reservations about the music industry, Buckner would soon sign on to the small independent label Overcoat records, releasing The Hill in 2000. One of his best recordings, it features the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology set to music in one continuous 34-minute track. Masters’ book, first released in 1915, is a collection of poems in which characters from the fictional Midwestern town of Spoon River speak from the grave, sharing their own epitaphs.

The characters and their stories frequently relate to others in the book, and one person’s epitaph might provide insight on events contained in another. The linking together of the songs on The Hill, so that it’s frequently hard to tell where one begins and another ends, provides an excellent musical counterpart to Masters’ book of interlocking stories in verse. Highlights include “Ollie McGee,” sung a capella in the mournful, drawn-out style popular with many old-time musicians, and “Oscar Hummel,” which concerns the killing of a drunken man by another man of supposedly high morals who believes drinking is a sin.

Impasse followed The Hill in 2002. By this time in his career, Buckner had begun using more percussion and included abrasive electric guitar work and keyboards on some tracks. His lyrics had grown more and more abstract.

After yet another move to a different label, Buckner released Dents and Shells in 2004 and his latest album, Meadow, in 2006. Meadow is the most purely rock-and-roll record of Buckner’s career. And while still moving away from traditional storytelling in his lyrics and toward more abstract forms of writing, his words retain their ability to get at the fractured emotional life of his characters. In “Window,” from the latest album, he sings, “Aren’t you cold standing by my window curtained up and closed?” The album is a fine addition to an already strong catalogue of work.

In his recorded work and live performances, Richard Buckner has proven himself to be one of the more thoughtful and talented songwriters currently working. His country music, in particular, is a welcome relief from much of the slick pop music made by the millionaires in cowboy hats found in Nashville today. Buckner is a serious artist, willing to challenge himself and his audience. This sort of figure is all too rare at present. His work is well worth listening to.

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The music of Richard Buckner

By Hiram Lee 4 August 2007

By Hiram Lee
4 August 2007