Tom Brosseau "What I Mean to Say is Goodbye" (Loveless)
By Kyle Wagner
Thursday. Jul 14, 12:39 AM
Stark beauty blanketed by a thin layer of dust.

Maybe I’m a sucker for an honest sense of longing, but the plaintive songs of Tom Brosseau’s What I Mean to Say is Goodbye were just what I needed when I listened to this album for the first time. Employing the usual singer-songwriter accoutrements of a guitar and harmonica (coupled with a remarkable voice that garners obvious and deserved comparisons to Jeff Buckley), Brosseau weaves together a sense of timelessness with a tinge of immediacy in a way that somehow feels so honestly American. But this is not the jingoistic America that today struts and frets its self-consumed hour upon the world stage. This, rather, is the America that you wish still existed (if it ever did.)

What I Mean to Say is Goodbye isn’t really the type of album where you single out one song as your favorite. It’s assembled more like a stylistic disjointed narrative in which a series of words, images, and impressions creates a coherent whole with layers that are difficult to pull apart. In the end, after all the different paths are explored, you are somehow left with a sense of understanding. Everything is tied together by images and themes: moving while the world around you stands almost still; a sense of space greater than that which your eyes can take in; landscape as metaphor. No particular lyrics stand out as profound, but they are strikingly impressionistic and work to create a soft, muted vision of a life that exists outside of time. You can almost sense a thin layer of dust covering everything. It’s rural, in an anthropological sense. It’s like an ethnographic film that has as its subject the part of America we take for granted or even dismiss, and it is told from the point of view of a wanderer who once called this place home. An insider’s view, but somehow still outside of things. There is a longing in soft focus, but it is never bland or overstated. For some reason this album feels like it should be listened to in solitude with few distractions. It’s sparsely populated, full of space, and simple, but it is a knowing simplicity rather than the simplicity of amateurism.

“Wear and Tear” is the closest Brosseau ever gets to a standard song structure and it’s the only track that employs percussion. The rest of the album meanders and sinews along ridges and valleys of its own design. It has an internal logic that reveals itself more and more with each listen. Two of the most ethereal vocal performances are on “Wandering” and the traditional “In My Time of Dyin’” (the latter of which gives a clue to Brosseau’s musical heritage). The harmonization with Angela Correa lifts these songs to somewhere beyond what Brosseau’s incredible voice can accomplish alone. For sheer beauty, you need to look no further than here.

Sometimes the wavering and wandering voice coupled with few instances of traditional song structure can be a bit overwhelming, but if you’re up to the challenge, the images conjured up through these 12 songs can leave you with an impression of profound beauty and a sense of having just witnessed a part of life different from your own, but still somehow familiar.
www.tombrosseau.com
www.lovelessrecords.com

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Kyle Wagner

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