Abney poetically channels invaluable self-insight in a way that gives it universal meaning.
The sad truth about memory is that it’s inherently unreliable: when you access it, you’re not remembering the event itself so much as the last time you recalled it. It’s this malleability of history that John Calvin Abney wanted to focus on when it came to his seventh LP, “Transparent Towns”. “Damn the dust storm / Blowing through my head,” he bemoans the fuzziness of recollection on the title track before equally lamenting all the empty words that go unspoken: “Damn the days / We let go left unsaid.”
‘Last Chance’ finds Abney meditating on the passage of time, and while he’s got enough insight to feel the good times for what they are in the moment (“Struck by suspicion / I’d never feel what I felt then”), that doesn’t mean he’s immune to looking back nostalgically, even when he wishes he wasn’t: “Say don’t think twice / But that’s what my mind does / Could we have known then / When our last chance was.” A classic story of longing to be back with the ones you love, ‘Wait For Us to Be Home’ works in its simplicity, the stripped-back nature adding to the intimacy. Abney’s vocal tone is sometimes flat – but never out of tune – adding a wonderful element of authenticity to the words he’s singing.
One thing that had a lot of people reflecting on society was the COVID-19 pandemic, and Abney was no exception. “Like prayers and pollen / I can’t hold on to / How we appear / In the smoke and mirrors at the end” are words he came up with when in enforced isolation and thinking of how we all masquerade in life. ‘Who You Thought I Was’ has a classic country twang, the lyrics evoking that vintage feel just as much as the music, as Abney sings of being away so long that both he and the place he calls home have changed.
A reminder not to revisit unhealthy habits, the jangling, acoustic ‘Door of No Return’ uses a fictitious door as a metaphor as a place not to return to: “Nothing that was will ever be / It doesn’t sit right with me / You only miss me when you’re low / Suppose that’s where I used to go / The door of no return.” ‘Sierra Dawn’, inspired by the time Abney spent working on construction tracts in the Nevada desert, tells of a number of interesting characters and the stories they relayed, while ‘Cardinal Direction’ is a dreamy love song that recalls the heady days of romance in the fresh stages of a relationship.
“We build these routines and live our stories, we rely on our histories and our memories – spoken and recorded,” Abney reflected on the album’s overriding theme of recollection and the legacies we leave behind us. “Now, we’re relying on copies of copies, memories of memories, all packed like sardines into our phones, and we’re losing the ability to tell our own stories.” Maybe it’s this self-awareness of the human condition that has helped Abney maintain his ability to story tell on “Transparent Towns”, and while he may say “this can only last so long” on the title track, let’s hope the end of his musical road is far in the distance.
