Riggings – The High and Lonesome Racket
Riggings’ latest single, “The High and Lonesome Racket,” out today, examines what songwriter Alex Riggs calls “the massive Queer Pain Industrial Complex that takes all queer suffering, sands it down, and repackages it for profit at the expense of art and personal expression.”
Riggings’ latest album, Egg, thwarts this complex by exploring several complicated human truths this album, with Riggs’s signature laid-bare honesty mixed with winking humor, exposing her vulnerability, her clever linguistic prowess, and her skill on a plethora of instruments.
“The High and Lonesome Racket” is three chords and the truth, with intricately embroidered piano work serving an insistent acoustic guitar strum, and thunderous electric. Alex’s voice is joined by the beautiful Mya Byrne, whose album Rhinestone Tomboy was a favorite last year; and Swan Real, a name that is too good, whose work I will be exploring.
Yesterday I was reading Sheena Patel’s novel I’m A Fan, in which the author writes, “We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn’t too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates… it’s not really such a burden to spin these pornographic trauma ballads for a little bit of status.”
The lyrics of “The High and Lonesome Racket” powerfully ponder this theme, exploring the idea of how queer artists and writers are burdened with proving to a cis-heteronormative society that they are, indeed, human, by revealing the regular difficulties they face, which certainly has the effect of moving people without such experience; but this has coupled queerness with inherent sadness in the collective straight imagination, which generates the demand for more and more similar stories, rather than celebrating all the other facets of human expression queer people experience.
The powerful second verse of “The High and Lonesome Racket” particularly movingly contemplates that societal hypocrisy, Alex singing, “Straight men love nothing more than writing about the end of the world, meanwhile my eyes are always looking for exits, no matter how many blankets are knit, no matter how many children grow, the jury’s still out on whether we should exist.“
Egg is Alex Riggs’ best album yet, and I’m so glad it exists. “This album is a prayer,” the liner notes read, quoting Carta Monir, “Being trans is a prayer for something better.”
Egg is out on Horse Complex Records on June 21st, 2024. Pre-order Egg on Bandcamp.
And look at this incredible shirt you can also buy on the Riggings bandcamp page:
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