Madeline Johnston’s fourth solo album as Midwife borrows its title from The Carter Family’s timeless and transcendent classic about leaving one’s worldly cares behind. The title presumably has some aspirational meaning, as the darker side of life is an eternal theme for Midwife, but it is also a nod to both Johnston’s life on the highway as a traveling musician (with a dying tour van) and to the many other road warriors that came before her. In keeping with that “road album” theme, Johnston also name-checks “outlaws” and “the psyche of America’s underbelly” as big influences and notes that most of the album was written almost entirely from the back of tour vans. That claim rings true, as this entire album feels unusually intimate, nocturnal, and stripped down and most songs are centered upon little more than Johnston’s voice and a few simple chords or arpeggios. In fact, almost every song on No Depression could literally be played on an unamplified electric guitar in the back of a van. Impressively, that stark minimalism suits these songs extremely well, as there are enough great lines and killer hooks here to make it clear that Johnston does not need much more than six strings and her voice to craft a memorable and emotionally heavy song. This is the Midwife vision distilled to its absolute essence.
Last year, I read Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life and there was a small bit in it about wanting to write a song called “Rock n Roll For President” that made me wince. I bring that up because No Depression’s opening song is entitled “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” and Johnston manages to miraculously sing lines like “if rock n roll is a dream, please don’t wake me” or "rock n roll will never die" without sounding irony-poisoned or ridiculous. As it turns out, execution is everything, as some people (Jason Molina, for example) can sing practically anything and make it sound profound and Johnston is blessed with that same gift herself. Consequently, “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” is a minor masterpiece of slow-burning magic and reads like a hissing, hypnagogic, and endearingly sincere love poem to the power and beauty of music. Yet another impressive feat is the stark simplicity of the music, as Johnston nicely embodies the old line about the essence of country music being “three chords and the truth.”
In this case, there are actually four chords, but each one only gets a single strum in the descending progression and Johnston enhances them with little more than a bit of delay. There is also a submerged sea of howling and moaning guitar noise buried in the mix, as well as a cool slide guitar crescendo, but the song would still sound amazing with just an unaccompanied acoustic guitar. The rest of the album is essentially six more melancholy, monochromatic variations on that same template, but it works every single goddamn time because Johnston’s performances are so honest, direct, and intense. The lyrics may change and Johnston may arpeggiate some chords, but the songcraft is invariably brilliant and the themes all tend to hit pretty hard (even the song about her tour van feels like a devastating break-up song).
To my ears, the two stone-cold instant classics on No Depression are “Droving” and the album’s lead single “Killdozer.” For the most part, the hushed beauty of “Droving” is not dramatically different from that of several other killer songs on the album, but the melodic hooks are unusually wonderful and there are a bunch of them. Also, the guitar part is absolutely sublime, as Johnston manages to make the sound of her fingers sliding around the fretboard sound legitimately beautiful.
Weirdly, the bittersweet “Killdozer” did not strike me as a uniquely brilliant Midwife song when it was initially released, but several of the lines have sneakily burrowed deep into my psyche since (“all my songs are love songs, all my songs are blue”). Also, Johnston’s nostalgic lament for a town made unrecognizable by gentrification (“ghosts even don’t try to haunt me”) cut even deeper once I learned that it was partially inspired by the bulldozer rampage/suicide of Colorado muffler shop owner Marvin Heemeyer.
Notably, that is one of many “easter eggs” strewn throughout No Depression, such as the lick from Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” buried in “Droving” or the fact that the title track seems to be just a single decontextualized word from a Roy Orbison song repeated and harmonized to mantric perfection. I’m sure I will find several other amusing or poignant allusions in the coming months and I am similarly certain that some of Johnston’s other lines will eventually reveal themselves as devastatingly poetic once I hear them enough. This album legitimately blindsided me (albeit in appropriately slow-motion), as I genuinely did not expect such a stripped-down album of rock n roll-themed road songs to rival early Midwife classics like the Prayer Hands EP. I now stand corrected. No Depression In Heaven is an absolutely mesmerizing album.
