For this one you can thank my friend Kent, who listens to more music than any human I know (and considering the humans I know\u2026!). He also frequently posts online about new discoveries. <\/p>\n
Kent raved about one such discovery in particular on multiple occasions recently, causing me to pick up Lonnie Holley\u2019s Oh Me Oh My<\/i> and get an education about the latter\u2019s remarkable career. A noted sculptor and visual artist by the time he hit 40, Holley was in his mid-50s before he began experimenting with vocal recordings of his poems, and 62 when his first album Just Before Music<\/i> appeared in 2012. <\/p>\n
Holley\u2019s fifth album Oh Me Oh My<\/i> is a bracing, in-your-face, beautiful, tragic, and compelling creation. Once you open yourself to the experience it offers, it\u2019s impossible to look away\u2014and that’s a good thing, because you shouldn’t. Holley\u2019s songs chronicle what one assumes is a mixture of lived experience and genuinely immersive storytelling, telling tales of the African American experience in this country mixed in with spiritual and cosmological musings. That\u2019s a rich and difficult vein of knowledge, and Holley does not pull his punches, though he’s always artful in the way he frames and tells these stories, which emerge as a sort of fluid, song\/song-poem\/spoken-word hybrid.<\/p>\n
Producer Jacknife Lee sets Holley\u2019s creations to relatively sparse arrangements\u2014dreamy synth washes, hints of electric piano and guitar, and appearing\/disappearing rhythm sections\u2014that nudge the melody along behind Holley\u2019s arresting delivery. His voice is raw and vulnerable, but fueled by the waves of emotion he pours into his performance. Every singer out there with a young and pretty voice would do well to pay attention to what Lonnie Holley achieves with his; you could learn a thing or two.<\/p>\n
Songs found here address topics as varied as faith (\u201cTesting\u201d and \u201cI Am Part Of The Wonder\u201d), slavery (\u201cBetter Get That Crop In Soon\u201d), family (\u201cKindness Will Follow Your Tears\u201d and \u201cIf We Get Lost The Will Find Us\u201d), mourning and grief (\u201cNone Of Us Will Have But A Little While\u201d), and technology (\u201cFuture Children\u201d). Each of these creations features Holley\u2019s haunting vocals veering between singing and intense spoken-word delivery, with a number of guest vocalists adding flavor, texture and alternate sonic perspectives at different points, including Moor Mother, Bon Iver, Sharon Von Etten and Rokia Kon\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Four tracks in particular cry out for a deeper look. \u201cOh Me Oh My\u201d feels like a sermon, a poem about the importance of community and family and recognizing your place as a part of something larger than yourself. Here Holley easily slips back and forth between spoken word and singing; he\u2019s a performing poet with music decorating and amplifying his message. Guest Michael Stipe\u2019s harmony vocals add dimension at key points as nearly six minutes pass by in what feels like a single, brilliant flash.<\/p>\n
The idea of community connects explicitly to the planet itself on \u201cEarth Will Be There,\u201d a salute to resilience of all kinds. It\u2019s a metaphor positing one\u2019s family as literally the ground beneath our feet, the foundation that enables us to stand tall (and will catch us when we fall), featuring a gentle funk backing, snappy horns, and Moor Mother performing the intense spoken-word bridge. <\/p>\n
The genuinely harrowing \u201cMount Meigs\u201d finds Holley reliving the experience of being sent to the so-called Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children as a boy in 1964. Lee sets this nightmare of beatings, abuse and isolation to careening, menacing, discordant music as Holley intones \u201cI was only trying to run away to find my mother \/ I needed my mother \/ I needed her hugs \/ I just needed her\u2026\u201d As the track swirls down to a close, Holley caps it with \u201cAll that information is still within me\u2026 At 71 years old and I still think of that day \/ The days and days and days \/ And more days on top of the days.\u201d It\u2019s every bit as brutal as the stretch of time it describes. <\/p>\n
Finally, \u201cI Can\u2019t Hush\u201d is a song of admiration and devotion saluting Holley\u2019s mother and grandmother, and by extension all mothers. In Holley\u2019s world these women dealt with \u201cAll the abuses and abuses and abuses \/ And the abuses and they said nothing \/ They just let them sink deep within.\u201d He again calls for community and connection as a remedy and source of strength: \u201cWhere we put our black hands \/ Together and act like a rope \/ No matter what conditions \/ We have to face \/ We face them together.\u201d <\/p>\n
Fair warning: Oh Me Oh My<\/i> is an immersive experience; while it\u2019s playing, you can’t really imagine paying attention to or doing anything else. It absorbs every millimeter of your focus and sends you back out into the world transformed, a newly birthed recipient of deep and ancient wisdom. Lonnie Holley is one of a kind and this a vital, compelling work of art. (Thanks, Kent.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10862],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-46675","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-lonnie-holley","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46675"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}