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“looking back’ll drag you down
Holding on will do the same
Reaching out to the divine
Always gets more than you give
Who is there to say I died?
Who is left to say I lived?
Oh, I got’s to go …”
talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words…
As wrong as it may seem to resort to such hoary clichés on the topic of an artist as singular as the endearingly scruffy and frightfully talented beaver Nelson and his fifth and undeniably most poetic batch of songs to date, when the shoe fits … well, wear the damn thing. And run with it.
So let’s talk about Motion, a word that summed up beaver Nelson long before he made it official by choosing it as the title of his latest record. It was another texas songwriter by the name of Nelson — this one Willie — who penned a song called “Still Is Still Moving to Me,” a notion that neatly describes the kind of moving beaver did for most of the ‘90s, all hyped-up (by Rolling Stone, no less) with nowhere to go, thanks to not one but two major label deals in his early 20s that resulted in … nothing. For better or worse (and the grateful artist in him leans mostly towards the former), beaver’s Sony album — written while he was still in his late teens — never saw the light of day, and any number of little obstacles kept him from striking out on his own until the 1998 release of his real debut, the last Hurrah. From that point on though, he’s made up for lost time with a vengeance: to date, the score is now five albums in six years, which averages out to an album a year with time out for daddy (to 3 1/2 year old son Jack) duty.
Funny thing is, though, it wasn’t until Motion that this very busy beaver got around to really writing about doing things.
“It’s not like there weren’t any verbs on my first four records,” laughs Nelson on a recent afternoon while sitting in the kitchen of the house on the outskirts of Austin that he shares with Jack and his wife, Stephanie. “but the songs on this record are much more pro-active and less reflective than a lot of my songs in the past. there were a lot of theories and observations on my first four records: I think this; I feel this. but observation only gets you so far. there finally comes a point where it’s like, ‘Well, OK, what are you going to do about it?’ I don’t think the words got any simpler on this record, but what those words are about is the fact that words are not enough. We can sit around and drink beer and smoke cigarettes all night about how this or that should be different, but it’s in the clear light of day in the morning when we wake up that we either do or do not do. And I’ve gone through a lot more of that on a personal level in the last two years — just attempting to do rather than attempting to imagine.
“Motion isn’t necessarily just going from one place to another,” he continues. “It’s action. It’s movement. And movement implies purpose and decision, as opposed to no purpose and indecision.”
Fittingly, Nelson went into the recording of Motion with a very definite sense of purpose — though it was and intriguingly open-minded one. Recorded primarily at Route 1 studio in Monticello, Miss. (beaver’s father’s hometown) with fine-tuning done in Austin, Motion teams Nelson once again with his trusted sidekicks “Scrappy” Jud Newcomb (guitar, co-production), Stephan belans (drums) and Josh Gravelin (bass), along with guests Eliza Gilkyson and Jeff Johnson (vocals), Matt Hubbard (keyboards) and Kevin Russell of the Gourds (mandolin). In contrast to Nelson’s first three albums, each of which featured its own distinct and unifying “core sound” (fiddle and mandolin on the last Hurrah, horns and organ on little brother and omnichord and piano throughout Undisturbed), the only rule of thumb guiding the Motion sessions was that there were no rules.
“On this record, we didn’t want a core sound,” says Nelson, “so we were a lot less inhibited. If someone had an idea, we tried it. In the past, Jud might throw one or two things on the table when we were looking for a guitar solo. but by me making it clear that nothing was out of bounds, all of a sudden he’s throwing five options on the table, and naturally I was gravitating towards the strangest one possible.”
Nelson became enamored with this freewheelin’, anything goes approach while making his last record, 2002’s legends of the Superheroes. Rather than booking regular studio time, Nelson recorded that album piecemeal over the course of a year on a friend’s computer, spending a grand total of (shh!) $150 on what turned out to be one of the most popular and acclaimed albums of his career. “that was clearly not my best sounding record at all, but I had people telling me, ‘this is your best record!’” marvels Nelson. “the message that got through to me on that was that people had more fun listening to it, because there were so many different choices that got made on that record and lots of oddball stuff going on. So it hit me: I want that playfulness again, but I want to match it with a quality, studio sound.”
the result, with Motion, is Nelson’s most adventurous and rewarding album yet, veering recklessly yet confidently from Replacements-style rock ’n’ roll (“Minute Man”) to reggae (“It Is there”) to soulful gospel (“loving Arms of God”) and everything in between. It’s all tied together by the uniform (but loose!) excellence of the playing, the aforementioned theme of action over reaction and Nelson’s distinctive boyish rasp of a voice, the perfect vehicle for delivering his unfailingly catchy melodies and poetic wordplay. time and again on Motion, Nelson’s songs prove that clever and insightful — indeed, even spiritual — needn’t always be mutually exclusive, and the bounciest melodies this side of buddy Holly can carry lyrics worthy of a master class in form and craft. to wit: take a gander at the poetic structure and density of the deceptively sing-songy “It Really Shouldn’t be So Hard,” if you can stop bobbing your head to the music long enough to study the metaphorical lyrics and rhyme scheme.
“the chorus is, ‘It really shouldn’t be so hard / I was just trying to get to the other side,’ and what I did was I just took the four basic elements — earth, air, water and fire — and each verse is about crossing one of those, and I wrote each verse primarily using a different consonant,” says Nelson. “I decided I didn’t want to actually try to explain what it was I personally trying to cross or achieve, because I didn’t want it to be emotionally or thematically exclusive. It can be anything for anybody. but I think it’s clear that it’s about a struggle to do something good.” Or, as he puts it much more succinctly in the first four lines of the album opening “let Us build a Monument”: “let’s do something wonderful / let’s do something grand / let us build a monument / that we don’t understand.”
“I’ve been reading a lot of books about old, old things,” Nelson explains. “So there’s a lot of use of ancient imagery that runs through the whole record, which ties into the notion of exhorting people to remember that they can do something worthwhile. they can create and do, and they’re making choices constantly with their lives. Every day, we’re making decisions that are creating obviously tangible results, but we’re also making decisions that are creating intangible monuments that are just as meaningful in our effect on other people’s lives.”
that, in the proverbial nutshell, is Motion: something meaningful, something wonderful. but enough with words and explanations already. Just play it. And, if the music and spirit moves you, take a cue from beaver and go out and do something grand yourself. It really shouldn’t be so hard … and it isn’t.
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