How We Fall Into a Dream…
As I sit out on my deck, looking over the blooming flowers of early spring, my mind is transported back to a time when discovering new music felt like an actual discovery. Finding some wonderful or rare album purely by chance because of radio or recommendation or happenstance background shuffle mode. These days, while I never tire of finding new music, it’s long become a kind of task I set out to do, it’s not…magical. This album, however, this album is magical. I can’t even tell you how I found it, but I did, and I have been utterly obsessed ever since. Not to give up the game, but not only is this album a go-to favorite, but this is one of the very best albums released in my lifetime.
Have You in My Wilderness
Julia Holter
Art Pop | 2015
Julia Holter cut her teeth in the music industry by immediately being as unconventional as possible. Her first albums came in buckets: six in four years; and they shifted from the highly experimental, taking great inspiration from avant-garde composers like Stravinsky, to field recordings, a genre many would claim is technically not music at all.
But in 2012, she released Ekstasis, a lush, ethereal collection of psychedlic ambient pop songs that would begin to showcase her sonic direction. It was followed in 2013 by Loud City Song, an even more ambitious volume of atmospheric chamber pop that won her the attention and praise of music critics the world over. Holter had come into her own, and it was time to really show everyone exactly how inventive, quirky, and passionate she could be.
Feel You
The album opens with the sounds of the harpsichord, a Julia Holter specialty, and a signature of this album. It’s plucking is delightfully light as distant coos enter before the full orchestra joins in with a post-punk-inspired bass. As the drum kit joins, it also adds post-punk vibes to this otherwise very chamber pop song. When Holter begins the first verse with some wonderfully visual poetry: “My first thought was there are / So many days of rain is Mexico City / A good reason to go / You know I love to run away from the sun.” It’s delivered in a Holter-brand off-kilter that keeps you hanging on every syllable. The strings swell for the chorus, another fantastic set of lines: “Can I feel you? Are you / Mythological? / Figures pass so quickly that I realize / My eyes know very well / It’s impossible to see / Who I’m waiting for in my raincoat.” Eat your heart out, William Carlos Williams.
Silhouette
Side note: does anyone else think it’s weird that two Rewinds in a row contain a song called “Silhouette”? I swear that wasn’t on purpose.
“Silhouette” begins with a shambling drum kit and a playful electronic piano flitting around its edges while Holter’s backing coos float over the scene, and they will continue to do so throughout this track’s runtime. Her lyrics come in and immediately stun: “I go out to find / The one with whom I’ve seen all hour’s moons.” The song is a beautiful, subtle metaphor for a relationship that ends purely because of monotony and boredom, an idea perfectly juxtaposed by Holter’s odd, scale-jumping delivery of the chorus: “He can hear me sing / He can hear me sing though he is far / I’ll never lose sight of him / He turned to me then looked away / A silhouette, a silhouette / Still returns to me.” The songs ends with a long, slow, but incredibly powerful build-up of electronic piano, more harpsichord, and layer upon layer of strings and Holter’s vocalizations.
How Long?
The story and lyrics of “How Long?” are a condensed retelling of the story of Sally Bowles, a character in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It is one of dejection and depression, as the Sally character is a washed-up cabaret singer who, despite her best efforts, has landed neither her dream acting role, or a wealthy husband, the two means of escape available to her in Weimar Germany. But the real star of the song is the string arrangement, which so perfectly captures the feeling of the story, as well as impeccably following and incorporating Holter’s vocal delivery.
Lucette Stranded on the Island
“Lucette” opens with a clattering of cowbells, indicative of the weird-er journey this song will take us on. Again inspired by a novel—this time it’s Colette’s Chance Acquaitances—Holter takes us on a bizarre journey of a woman left stranded on a Balearic island by her illicit lover. Her delivery of the verses is nearly stream-of-consciousness, accented at seemingly random intervals by imitation bird calls. The chorus adds in an actual beat, tempo, and organzation to the character’s thoughts (and rhyme scheme to Holter’s lyrics), as well as delightful piano and airy backing vocals. The final chorus extends into a minutes-long interlude, with Holter telling the rest of the story around a wonderfully sung line, “the birds can sing a song,” repeated endlessly at different pitches to match the ever-increasingly frenetic playing of the drums, cymbal crashes, and piano, while more and more backing voices make bird calls to evoke the lonely shore, watching a lover’s ship slowly get smaller and smaller before disappearing over the horizon forever.
Sea Calls Me Home
This is the pièce de résistance, perhaps Julia Holter’s finest song, and among the finest songs of the 2010’s. The harpsichord returns to open the track, taking pride of place along with Julia Holter proudly proclaiming her freedom, and the feeling of liberation that comes with leaving the past—and specifically familiarity—behind. Here visualized by taking to the high seas, Holter expounds on the necessity to do scary, new things in order to truly experience radical independence: “Wear the fog, I’ll forget the rules I’ve known.” The chorus is delivered in a near march, with regimented drums and the harpsichord matching in time. Her fear of swimming will not stop her from moving into this new life; the sea, like her future, is so clear.
But then this shit gets wild, and is why I absolutely adore this song so much. There’s an instrumental breakdown that starts with Holter…attempting to whistle a note-for-note match of the verse structure, but either it’s out of her whistling range, or the character she’s portraying is become more and more frazzled by their being on the ocean, surrounded by an endless expanse of water in which she cannot swim, desperately whistling to keep the bad thoughts at bay and losing (I prefer this explanation). Then a saxophone enters and it is the craziest goddamn sax solo I’ve heard outside of experimental jazz. It is just nuts, and it so wonderfully symbolizes the trials and tribulations of someone who will do this by myself GODDAMMIT! When Holter returns to sing the final chorus, her voice sounds the same, but feels like it’s just on the verge of screaming: “I. Can’t. Swim. It’s Lucidity! So Clear!” She’s surrounded by even wilder sax sounds and a flood of strings and backing vocals, proving that, as terrifying as it may be, yes, this was the right decision.
God, I LOVE this song. It is so, so good.
Night Song
The second half of Have You in My Wilderness is a deeper, more lush experience than the first half. “Night Song” is the perfect example of this. Each repetition of the chorus is steeped in reverbed backing coos and ahhs, and full orchestral string sections. Lyrically, Holter tells the story of a woman scorned, confronting an unfaithful partner. That chorus sees her demanding him to “show me now / Show me your second face,” as he is clearly a totally different person when she’s not around. Her vocal delivery of the closing section of “what did I do to make you feel so bad,” is both strikingly beautiful and devastatingly heartbreaking.
Everytime Boots
Okay, so maybe “deeper” means deeper into Holter’s eccentricities, because this is for sure a weird one. The song begins with odd, distorted bells, before dropping the theme entirely for a…jovial Matt-and-Kim-style piano and drum indie pop track. The lyrics include some more of Holter’s one-upmanship of WC Williams again, with lines like “Oh, true, it’s brighter than / The sky we left years ago / I’ll take a photograph and pass it / By my eyes for all these times / That I decamp so wearily.” It’s an incredibly fun little ode to packing up and hitting the road, Easy Rider style. It definitely has it’s moments of…oddity though, like after the second chorus when the whole song drops away leaving only a forlorn string section and a long-ride cymbal, before Holter sings the other sections back into their original jaunty tune.
Betsy on the Roof
“Betsy on the Roof” is Holter’s best impression of a French “La Vie en Rose” cabaret performance, and she frickin’ nails it. It’s just her and her grand piano, and it’s one of the most naked and revealing performances of her career. That said, lyrically, it’s all about the mood, and don’t try to read into it. No, really, Julia Holter, literally said that, in an interview with Nowness: “there’s very little imagery or character development.” The song is filled with desperation and longing for…something, but Holter’s purposefully evasive lyricism means you can inset whatever it is you’re longing for in the pregnant pauses. It ends with the addition of a few mournful strings and background effects, but the track as a whole is incredibly bare, and is just beautiful because of it.
Vasquez
The album’s longest and most experimental track, “Vasquez” sees Holter inhabiting the ghost of Tiburcio Vásquez, a California bandido of the mid-19th Century. Much of her lyrics are spoken, as Vásquez, describing the things he’s seen, places he’s been, and his running from authorities. Her retelling is beautifully done, with lines like: “They found me there / Chased after me / I crawled away quickly / Wasn’t sure if I was lost or if I was running away again;” and the fantastic second chorus: “They put me to sleep / On diagonal rocks / So no one tells the story / Of Bandido / In the gold country.”
This story is told over an incredibly lush, positively resplendent backing track of ethereal strings, long-held electic piano chords, and some of the jazziest drums a long-form story can handle. At moments, there’s bits of improvisation that pop forward from a violin here, and keyboard there, or the return of the wild saxophone after the second chorus. The whole piece feels cohesive and awesome like being totally mesmerized by the best storyteller around the campfire.
Have You in My Wilderness
The final track, the title track, begins with Holter’s voice in the clear, backed only by distant vocalizations, calling to mind a late-career Björk sound, before an upright bass and a soft synthesizer enters to bolster the track. With these additions it changes the song to a 60’s wall-of-sound ballad, especially when the “oooh-shoo-wah” backing vocals coming in during the last section, mimicking the “she-bop she-bop”s of the Flamingo’s “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Holter’s tale, one that summarizes the album’s topic as a whole, is one of a delusional lover who tries his best to get the girl and just can’t understand why she leaves in the end. “Lady of gold / You would fit beautifully / In my wilderness,” Holter sings, giving us one last taste of her poetic genius, “oh in your waters, I’ve dropped anchor / You’ll see lightning cascading / Pronouncements of our love.” And as the emotion and the music builds with layer upon layer of strings and pianos, “tell me why do I feel you running away?”
Nothing gold can stay.
As stated at the open, Have You in My Wilderness is, in my opinion, one of the very best albums of my lifetime. It saw Julia Holter take many of her wilder impulses and hone them down to a tight, ten-track homage to 50’s and 60’s love songs with a quirky twist that makes them utterly addictive.
The production throughout, especially in recording and mixing Holter’s vocals is just stunning, and those vocals are some of the most interesting, intriguing, and learned I’ve ever heard. Her delivery gives Mitski a run for her money in terms of squeezing every possible syllable into a rhyme scheme without regard for…well, rhyming.
And then there’s the songwriting and instrumentation. Each song constantly flits and flirts with twelve different genres, while somehow staying entirely of it’s own sound palette. There are moments when listening to this album where I genuinely think “what is happening right now?” Confused, but in the most delicious way. Julia Holter’s music is a 10,000,000-piece puzzle that only gets more and more rewarding the more you piece it together, only to reveal…
A masterpiece. I can unabashedly say, Have You in My Wilderness is a masterpiece.
Happy listening!
P.S. If you like some of the weirder elements of this one, you’ll love her follow-up, Aviary, a 90-minute double album that is…like a journey into The King in Yellow. I swear, I finished listening to that album and was never psychologically the same.
