Will Stratton – Points of Origin

I received this record in early December, the record came out this Friday, and I immediately opened my editor because I was immediately floored. Some of this was written then, some now, because so much has changed. First of all, this album has everything I love – a concept, fictional characters in a real universe, California, mentions of AQI (wildfire is a main theme and ok I don’t love the air quality index but it’s relevant to my daily life), an exploration from Bakersfield to Niland, beautiful instrumentation throughout, a lovely voice, standout lyricism. One of those beautiful classic folk records that are rare to come by in this day and age.

Stratton, who currently resides in Beacon, New York, selecting California as a setting and theme for a decidedly fictional folk universe, is of particular interest to me. This is an interesting follow-up to the last post (a decidedly anti-California California folk song by New Yorkers Heat Manager), I’m interested in the ambivalence us coastal elites feel between the two poles of the country. There’s always a certain longing and wistfulness towards the other, and something about the blog itself follows this trajectory. When I was in New York, all I did was wish for California, but I got to see amazing musicians like Stratton and his cohort on the regular, and had the time to write about them- while now I find myself strapped for time although visiting musicians are rare and time even more precious. Find out that Stratton was born in California makes me think he shares this very location-aware sensibility.

Points of Origin reflects on the contradiction of the latent disaster in contrast with the beauty of the most magical, albeit stolen land.

From Ben Seretan’s liner notes,
The puny, beautiful, sun-bleached lives of truckers, surfers, runaways, drunks, thieves, CIA operatives, foresters, arsonists, lawyers, and painters intertwine, fall apart, and are ultimately reduced to dust in the 10,000 year-long span of Points of Origin, a heartbreaking and expansive album of songs by Will Stratton set in the freeway wilds of California. Novelistic, as dense as a Pynchon picaresque, and just absolutely lovely to listen to, these ten songs contain some of the most poignant considerations of the horrifying realities of anthropocentric climate change ever set to melody. These wildfires, these mudslides, these intensifying storms – we caused them and every single one of us has a story, interconnected and touching others as our world burns. May the flames that lick menacingly at the border of the frame cleanse us of our wrongdoings.