American Elm is Chris Bousquet, a singer-songwriter from Connecticut who has a remarkable list of renowned artists he’s performed with including, Roger McGuinn, Mercury Rev, Howe Gelb, Miracle Legion, Asleep at the Wheel, Rhett Miller, Mark Mulcahy, The Turtles, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, and Susan Cowsil. Today’s song ‘Me And Ana Lee’ is taken from ‘Resounder‘ which isn’t an album – at least not yet – but is what Chris Bousquet describes as a ‘Song Cycle‘. He elaborates on what this means, and what ‘Resounder‘ consists of saying: “‘Resounder’ is a live song cycle, kind of like an album if it was mostly ephemeral and could only exist as performed in front of a audience.
After my mother passed away and my father moved to the Finger Lakes to live with my brother, I lived in my childhood home in Clinton, Conn., mostly by myself, for an entire year. These are the songs I wrote there. It was not the easiest year of my life, but somehow it was one of the better ones; full of magic and wonder, wrought with and by both joy and loss. A year in which I seemingly lived in two worlds, this visible one, and the invisible one beyond it: a place where I received profound messages from songbirds and clear signs from people who were no longer among the living. I read Rilke and Dante and listened to lots of Bob Dylan and J. Mascis: I felt understood.
I always say, the better a song is, the less I know where it came from. In that year, in that house, I wrote 17 of the best songs I’ve ever written (15 love songs and two songs about the guy who wrote the other 15 songs), and I don’t know where they came from. On this one night, I’m going to sing them all.”
Previous Song Cycles have been recorded in one way or another, including filmed records such as 2018’s The ‘Year of the Horse: A Folk-Rock Song Cycle.‘ What can we say of today’s song? Well, it creaks with ages that have gone before, you’d swear it was 100 years old and yet it feels like a reflection of a downbeat mood that fits with the now of today. Mostly though it’s a song that creeps in and takes hold of the listener – and that’s often the best kind of song.
Hmmmn … this is a bit of a grower, and growing by the minute!