In the run-up to Interior Live Oak, his alchemically melodious new LP, Cass McCombs’ plan was to strip the songs’ arrangements to their communicative basics. “When you do that,” he says, “it’s amazing how swift everything moves. Choice can often be a burden so when you’re working with the essentials, it can be exhilarating. If the song is written well enough it really doesn’t need very much except to be understood in a very rudimentary way. Jason [Quever, co-producer] and I fell back into our approach from years ago, him on drums, me on guitar. Plenty of dust ripping through time.”
“Plenty of dust rippling through time…”
In the run-up to Interior Live Oak, his alchemically melodious new LP, Cass McCombs’ plan was to strip the songs’ arrangements to their communicative basics. “When you do that,” he says, “it’s amazing how swift everything moves. Choice can often be a burden so when you’re working with the essentials, it can be exhilarating. If the song is written well enough it really doesn’t need very much except to be understood in a very rudimentary way. Jason [Quever, co-producer] and I fell back into our approach from years ago, him on drums, me on guitar. Plenty of dust ripping through time.”
That reconnection with the past shows in the set’s contemplative, at times elegiac mood: “Music should be personal, it should speak from the soul. I don’t think the slickness of session musicians can hold a candle to what friends can do – that’s what lasts, this personal connection.”
As with 2022’s Heartmind, some of Interior Live Oak deals with the deaths of close friends; yet McCombs has no advice on how to tackle those experiences.
“I’ve lost some close people but I have no profound insight on how to grieve. Actually, I found that I have a capacity towards rage and anger and music is my outlet. I don’t think music needs to be fluffy 100% of the time – sometimes it needs to be nasty, digging in the mud and muck, as long as it’s real. My friend who is the subject of ‘Priestess’ was like that. She always spoke her mind and if the darkness surrounded her, she embraced it.”
16 ineluctably lovely songs
Now read our review of Interior Live Oak…
CASS MCCOMBS
Interior Live Oak
DOMINO
9/10
Rumination and peerless lyricism on his longform latest…
For a man whose discomfort when fielding questions about himself is palpable, McCombs is remarkably forthcoming in song. His status as an unreliable narrator notwithstanding, he can’t help but reveal himself, and these 16, ineluctably lovely songs are his most personally reflective for some time. They’re also among his most structurally straightforward. With guitarists Dan Iead, Mike Bones and Matt Sweeney on board, McCombs cuts an intuitive tack between countrified pop and soul, revealing a melodic affinity with the disparate likes of Marvin Gaye (in the poignant “Priestess”), The Go-Betweens (a shimmering “Peace”, with its defining guitar trill) and, on the ravishing “Who Removed The Cellar Door?”, Gene Clark.
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