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Glenn Jones, "My Garden State"
Glenn Jones' music is an omnipresent force. No pretensions or barriers to entry exist in well-executed American primitivism; the baggage is made along with the impression made on the listener. This album is inspired by a host of personal conflicts for Jones, primarily that the recording sessions occurred while he was taking care of his ailing mother in a nursing home in New Jersey. But he never compromises his artistic intent in the midst of trying times, only injecting them with a savvy humanism. The songs he's created are, even in their exact subject matter, timeless and miraculous things.
The songs of My Garden State are all very personal. Nearly all of them are named for local areas in Jersey visited by Jones during his recording sessions, and all of them are self-authored acoustic songs. A Jersey native, he seems to entertain a conviction for self therapy through the sights and sounds of the state, even as landmarks only grow known through sad circumstances. American primitivism, at the same time, usually frames itself from a populist and anonymous character, and the man often tasked with writing up blurbs for John Fahey or lending material to Jack Rose knows that the real, inimitable pure folk has to show individual conflicts as universal and irresolute. So while it's not without its heart—nor would I ever ask for it to be—this music is still in the truest sense folk, and its messages are common and applicable to anyone who has ever had hardships.
"Alcouer Gardens," the retirement home where his mother had received treatment for Alzheimer's disease, is a somber but uplifting guitar melody, spontaneously composed, which wanders alongside sampled thunderstorms. "Going Back To East Montgomery" is a duet with Meg Baird, whose late song contributions on banjo justify its eight minute running time. Likewise, "Like A Sick Eagle Looking At The Sky" and "Bergen County Farewell" court anthemic territory by way of smartly intoned melodies that are neither pure blues nor unabashedly saccharine. These songs are not "catchy" so much as deeply purposeful. It's as if they're always there, in some space or aura, and Jones simply captured them in his strings.
These compositions chronicle travel and the passage of time, the catharses of forward movement (as signified by Glenn's persistent low-register quarter notes), and a naturalistic simplicity that eschews the often contrived inspirations behind a lot of modern guitar music. Jones extracts a common sentiment among anyone familiar with guitar music, the attraction of a journey, and uses it to his own means in expanding his melodies as tools for evoking emotion and preventing them from becoming dilute. This is music untethered by its era, its context or even the family struggles that drove so much of its inception. It just keeps going. Not until "Chimes II" has everything come to a stop, and it has become a cycle, waiting to be heard again.
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