Some records are made out of obligation; others are motivated by sheer desire. Ex Tempore (Rte. Eight/RCAM, street date August 7, 2007), the new album from writer/artist Johnny Irion, falls into the latter category. The title was inspired by the rapid pace of its creation—a pace that undoubtedly contributed to the immediacy of this song cycle, a varied yet cohesive collection intermingling piano balladry, Americana, chamber pop and folk-style fingerpicking, with the occasional blast of skronky rock to clear the air.
These songs trace the contours of contemporary existence in a readily recognizable and often powerfully relatable way. “Brush Yr Teeth Blues 56” places a lullaby to Irion’s 4-year-old daughter Olivia in an image-laden domestic setting so vivid that you can smell the cut flowers and coffee. Sarah Lee Guthrie, Johnny’s partner in life and music, sings on that one, and she also joins with the Hedgspeth Family Singers on the gospel-inflected backing vocals of “Short Leash,” as they animate one extreme in the song’s depiction of the psychological chasm between big dreams and the constraints of everyday life. “Loves tall as towers/We all wanna climb and reach,” Johnny sings, the melancholy in his fragile tenor juxtaposed with the fervor of the female voices, “I know I’m preaching to the choir/But I’m on a very short leash.” “Good Cry” came out of an early morning visit to the neighborhood coffee shop, where Irion found his waitress friend sobbing. Seeing him walk through the door, she composed herself and looked him in the eye. “This is what I do every morning so I’m not a bitch,” she explained. After telling the story, Johnny adds, “I liked that,” and no more explanation is needed.
In a burst of inspiration last summer at the Guthrie compound in rural Massachusetts, Irion wrote and demo’d a whole bushel of songs. When he went through them, he noticed that a number of the new tunes naturally cohered to each other, and he couldn’t wait to record them for real—which is where the pressure came in. He and Sarah Lee were in the midst of participating in the yearlong Family Tour organized by her dad Arlo; Ryan Pickett, who was slated to produce and engineer, does the live sound mix for My Morning Jacket; and the project’s primary rhythm section, bassist Jay Brown and drummer Zeke Hutchins, are fulltime members of Tift Merritt’s band. Consequently, the windows of opportunity were as small as portholes, and on top of that Johnny was recording on an indie budget. “It’s was like the old Motown days—‘Well, we’ve got an hour,’ ” says Irion. “In that kind of situation, you can’t talk about it too much—you just do it.”
The core band recorded most of the album live off the floor, later overdubbing strings on “Roman Candle” and “Brush Yr Teeth Blues 56” and horns on four others, along with additional guitar parts here and there. Bassist Bryan Hoard and drummer Dave Johnson (aka the Corner Pockets), who toured with Johnny and Sarah Lee behind their 2004 album Exploration, played on “Brush Yr Teeth Blues 56” and the rocker “Madrid.” John Teer and Greg Readling of bluegrass group the Chatham County Boys also made key contributions. “We weren’t trying to make a commercial-breakthrough pop record,” says Irion. “It’s music made off the cuff with great players. There’s no way I could’ve begun to pull it off without those guys.”
On the album’s centerpiece, the existential epic “Roman Candle,” Irion and his campadres threw out the rulebook and went for the whole enchilada, with breathtaking results—demonstrating that imagination and spiritual elevation are far more crucial to creating art than a big budget. Over a rhythmic bed composed of a drum machine and a piano played to a click track, Brown and Hutchins overdubbed bass and drums, Beatles-style, providing a sturdy foundation for the track’s soaring sonic architecture. In the widescreen payoff, a wash of regal strings (as Teer impersonated an entire string section) surrounds Irion’s anxious voice as he sings the urgent refrain, “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know it’s catchin’ up with me.” It’s an unforgettable moment, simultaneously capturing the despair and joy at the extremes of existence, and it seems to come out of nowhere, like an epiphany.
Irion came upon the central metaphor during a speaking engagement by South Carolina novelist Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides). “At one point,” Johnny recalls, “he said, ‘She was goin’ off on me like a Roman candle.’ I loved that, so I used it. He’s rich enough that he probably won’t come knockin’ at my door.” The song’s melodic movement recalls the lushness of Badfinger’s “Without You”; Irion counts Pete Ham as a major inspiration. The spirit of Neil Young is also present, here and elsewhere, in Johnny’s feathery vocals, with their intimations of bottomless emotion.
Similarly, “1000 Miles an Hour” seems to bear the melodic influence of Young’s ballads, but Irion says it came out of concentrated listening to classical music, Dvorak in particular, along with a bunch of Woody Guthrie songs, which somehow led him to the Elizabeth Cotton-style fingerpicking that embroiders the track, with Readling’s pedal steel hovering overhead. Indicative of the freewheeling way Johnny’s mind works (“I’m an Aquarius—I jump around a lot,” he points out), this musical impulse blossomed into a song only after he learned while listening to NPR that the earth spins at exactly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. “That got me goin’,” he says. “It really started off as a kind of bedtime song. I put Olivia to sleep a couple nights singing it to her.”
These songs are suffused with artistic aspiration, but at the same time, Irion sounds very much like a guy whose first priority is to put food on the table, which is indeed the case; the couple is expecting a second child in August, right around Olivia’s fifth birthday. There’s a palpable sense of life being lived—its ups, its downs, its everyday rhythms—in every note and measure of Ex Tempore; you couldn’t ask more than that from a record..
