It always has revolved around “Ariel Ramirez.”
The third track on Richard Buckner’s 1998 LP Since is the finest moment on the entire album.
From the first moments of the song, Buckner’s voice appears to birth the carefully fingerpicked acoustic guitar lead that follows. “Oh, where you lay/ Your head tonight/ I’ll roll away alone/ And close on down.” The piece has an amazingly organic sense of pace; it almost sounds off-handed, like Buckner is sort of toying around with the frame of the song as he’s writing it. The lyrics are cryptic but oddly conversational.
“Put Ariel on/ And smoke away the night/ And do the white net crawl/ Until the hammers fall.”
After an unexpected instrumental bridge, “Ariel Ramirez” is adorned (however briefly) with steady rhythms – a heartbeat, even. By the time Buckner reaches the last couplet of the stanza – “But in the end/ I missed what it meant” – the scaffolding again falls away and we’re left with those fragile finger-picked acoustics again, and with Buckner’s hefty, almost husky voice.
“Oh where you lay/ Your head tonight,” he sings again. “I’ll roll away alone/ And close on down.”
Buckner was a masterful storyteller from the get-go. His 1994 debut, Bloomed, was full of folksy story-songs that relied heavily on context. Not so incidentally, the record was captured to tape in Lubbock, Texas – a city on the southern lip of the state’s High Plains, which contains evidence of human residency dating back more than 11,000 years. Oh – and, yeah, it’s the birthplace of Buddy Holly. The record remains a fine debut — though, viewed through the lens of the eclectic work that followed, Bloomed feels almost monochromatic by comparison.
After signing with MCA Records, who Buckner later dubbed “Musical Career Assassins,” he released his first gem, 1997’s Devotion + Doubt. While many today associate Buckner’s second record proper with his first earwig, the lyrically dense “Lil’ Wallet Picture,” the whole thing was really out there for an acoustic-guitar-playing singer-songwriter before the dawn of the new millennium. Backed by Arizona legends Giant Sand, Buckner’s work sometimes teetered on the overly poetic – but he always displayed a firm grasp of his intentions. Did we mention Marc Ribot is on this thing? Critics fawned.
That brings right up to 1998: Buckner’s third LP. And “Ariel Ramirez.”
No Giant Sand on this but Buckner assembled an ambitious set of collaborators – Tortoise’s John McEntire on drums, guitar-slinger Syd Straw and, oddly enough, David Grubbs, who was nearing the last days with his avant-garde duo Gastr del Sol. McEntire’s atypical meters and rock-solid consistency gave the skeletons of Buckner’s songs a firm spine. He wasted little time flashing the strut; the LP opens with “Believer,” practically a barn-burner by Buckner standards. The loose-limbed electric guitar was enough to announce the departure, nevermind McEntire’s excellent take on a 4/4 plod or some wicked little laptop steel solos. The lyrics are also incredibly visual but – again – kinda homespun. “I’ve seen your run/ And I’ll raze your faith until the vein is done and dry,” he sings at one point. “We’re all blown away unknown/ Wasted all the way to the fall,” he counters. Or: “Let’s make our own and wake up in some wild familiar time/ I wrote it out in stones where the road divides.”
This is rich stuff. And the whole damned thing runs at two minutes and 10 seconds. That’s it.
26 years later, the record still packs a punch – especially due to Buckner’s masterful lyricism and his ability to create deeply emotive yet amazing far from canned songs. He also offers more than a suggestion that we are somehow in on a joke about over-cooked sentimentality, of which the indie-folk singer-songwriter idiom is clearly well-versed. In one personal-favorite moment on the excellent “Jewelbomb,” Bucker pauses the verses and intones, “Hey there thunderhead/ I heard you’ve seen a little rain.” f*cking perfect.
Songs like “Slept” feel anachronistic; Buckner’s sparse guitar notes and finely chiseled lyrics offer moments where the noise falls away and he sort of half-belts out, “But here she walks again/ on bent-up promises.” (This also is a notable early example of Buckner singing parenthetical lyrics, I note parenthetically. Again, off-handed but also dead on target.) “Slept” captures the American southwest in a way similar to how Calexico does – the two, both of whom worked with producer JD Foster, supported each others’ acts in the late 1990s. At the same time, though, Since sounds like it was written and recorded on an entirely different planet than Calexico’s The Black Light. They came out the same year.
“Brief and Boundless” darts between quickly strummed ballad and an almost rock-ish jaunt, all offset by the repetition of three dramatically lonesome piano notes. “10-Day Room” is more true to Devotion + Doubt though Buckner flashes a playing method he later developed to a T; when he half-strums or half-picks a string, especially a low E, Buckner really gets underneath the string and almost seems to pull outward, lending a measure a weighty kind of thrum. “Raze” is understated and beautiful; at just two minutes and seven seconds, it leaves listeners hungry for more. “Now, the day has raged & rumbled/ But there’s a wisher in the phone,” he croons at the beginning of another rocker, “Coursed. “So, she stomps on through & knocks up some dream that/ He’d known.” Wow.
McEntire steals the lead a bit on “Hand @ The Hem,” which opens with luscious polyrhythms. But Buckner’s voice always commands center-stage and he quickly brings it to the fore as he curls around the syllables of a line: “Well, I’ll cure and comfort/ Where’s the bed I called you for?” The slide guitar on this one is indispensable.
In the years since, well, Since, Buckner has experimented with form and delivery, all to amazing effect. Buckner wonderfully toyed with glassy guitars and multi-tracked sentimentality on the title track to 2013’s Surrounded. He hinted at other musical eras while perfecting his finger-picking on “The Tether & The Tie,” off 2006’s Meadow. (That one runs at just under four minutes, but it’s the sort of melody one could listen to for 10 or 20.) He toyed with a gulping – some would say droning – Hammond to close 2004’s Dents + Shells, his first LP over at Merge. In 2000, he released a one-song LP crafted around the lyrics of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology;” it remains a crowning achievement.
In a lot of ways, though, all the great Buckner moments that the California-bred former Albertan/current Brooklynite has put to tape in the past 10 or 15 or even 20 years all owe something to Since. In the songs he crafted, in lyrics he managed to sound casual but precise, in his choice of backing musicians, Since was a big departure – and a gamble for a then-budding voice. But, damn, even when this hit the streets in ’98, it was instantly apparent this guy had nailed the thing in spades.
