Chris Bathgate - From the Earth, From the Depths

Cormac McCarthy is right: perhaps only at the end of time will we truly see the world for what it is. The majestic bulk of the mountains, the infinite horizon of the oceans. And silence turning into music. For now, we can only hear an echo of it, at once ancient and prophetic. "Folk music for the end of the world", we might call it: just as the title suggested for that YerBird Records compilation which, in 2007, helped establish Chris Bathgate's name among the most promising songwriters of his generation. A generation unafraid to relearn the language of tradition, in order to bend it to the present tense of its own heart. Because, as Bathgate explains, "most traditional music, to us, is like the unveiling of an essence; it's the documentation of the subtleties of what exists".

For someone like Chris Bathgate, raised in rural America, the bond with the land is a deeply intimate one. It's a connection rooted in belonging. Born in Iowa in 1982, despite repeated moves (first to Kentucky, then to Illinois), his early years all orbited around the Midwest: "Until the end of grade school I lived on the outskirts of a town called Rockford", he recalls. "Then our family moved to a farmhouse among the cornfields of Pecatonica. There wasn't even a traffic light, it had a strong small rural-town identity. We had to drive the tractor to school during prom week. Looking back, there was really very little contact with the outside world, aside from television. It was a strange and magical place to grow up."

Every now and then, something filtered through to Pecatonica, Illinois: "A few big festivals used to come to town, because the Winnebago County Fairgrounds was based there. One year Lollapalooza came, but I didn't go. Once Further Fest came too, but in a techno version instead of the reunion of Grateful Dead members. I was heading home and there was a line stretching the length of the town for the pay phones. Kids with purple mohawks and shaved heads were hanging out on the sidewalks in their huge pants."

And yet, music had always run through his days: his first band, in high school, was a heavy metal outfit ("better not say the name..."), but what changed his life was "Being There" by Wilco. "I've been writing songs since I was sixteen. I recorded at least one tape a year until the start of college, when I switched to cdrs. It's the only thing that's ever held my interest."

Save one for the morning

Modern, clean-lined buildings, lawns in orderly geometries, a squared-off tower rising on the horizon: Ann Arbor is a city of just over a hundred thousand people, built around the historic campus of the University of Michigan. College is the turning point for Bathgate: he enrolls in the university's School Of Art And Design, while performing in local cafes, running songwriting workshops, and improvising folk dances with friends. With Karl Sturk and Michael Beauchamp he forms a folk-bluegrass trio, the Ambitious Brothers: "We were sort of a hipster version of the Kingston Trio. We played in house gardens and on porches in the student ghetto. Towards the end I think we even played a tea room, and once we played on the stage of the Ann Arbor art fair."

Michigan's is a lively, vibrant artistic community. "I'm very proud of it. I'm surrounded by extraordinary songwriters and we all know each other pretty well." It's in that very context that Bathgate joins a "supergroup of crazy friends" with the improbable name The Descent Of The Holy Ghost Church: "The closest thing to Fleetwood Mac I've probably ever experienced", he calls it. Songwriting duties were split more or less evenly between Bathgate and Jansen Swy, and among the group's (crowded) ranks there was also room for another future leading light of the local singer-songwriter scene, Matt Jones. Before splitting up, the band managed to record a single album, "made literally in two chaotic days in a cabin on Lake Michigan."

"I've always played music on my own in some way, but 2005 probably brought with it a more official sense of being a totally separate entity from the other projects I'd been part of." Marking the start of this new phase is a self-produced collection of songs, which in 2005 takes the form of Bathgate's actual debut solo album: Silence Is For Suckers.

Despite its necessarily spartan approach, Silence Is For Suckers already shows a surprising attention to detail. Keyboard punctuations drive the crescendo of "Save One For The Morning", bolstered by interweaving trumpet, strings and electric guitar, while the drums mark out the restless tremor of "The Truth", steering it toward sharp edges.

Between pop lightness ("Loveless Son"), rustic marches ("Riverwide") and suspended spaces ("I've Been Saving Up"), Bathgate transfigures memories and emotions into a series of chiaroscuro snapshots: "I consider myself the product of my experiences and my thoughts, and that's what my songs represent too", he says. For him, the art of songwriting has nothing old-fashioned about it, because "there will always be people who aspire to write the perfect archetype."

The architecture of songs like "Iris" and "The 44's" rests on the guitar-banjo-voice triptych, drawing directly from the wellspring of folk roots. "To go beyond what tradition represents", Bathgate reflects, "you first have to get inside its dynamics: and maybe that's exactly where the point of balance lies." To explain this, Bathgate points to the history of the Carter Family: "Some of their songs were a patchwork pieced together from a number of different sources. They made quite a bit of money appropriating the music of isolated communities. A.P. Carter used to travel around collecting melodies, songs and verses from people. Those songs weren't necessarily historically accurate, but without his work of collecting - and appropriating - nothing of them would have survived."

Silence and truth betroth

"I write songs. They're all true, they're all something that happened, they're all an idea, they're all deeply rooted in my heart." That's how Chris Bathgate introduces himself on his MySpace page. And it's precisely through the web that his name begins to draw attention beyond Michigan's borders: thanks to word of mouth spreading virally through blogs, Bathgate's second album, Throatsleep, earns a prominent place among the great hopes of American songwriting in 2006.

The acid-edged distortions and dry drumming of the opening "Creak, Cure, Dawn" immediately bring to mind early John Vanderslice, with his lean, sharp-edged narratives. "I learned to sing from the creaking of the gallows", sings Bathgate, and his taut, quivering voice bears direct witness to it in a flow of piercing chiaroscuro. Out of a lament that seems to rise from the throat of Will Oldham come the crisp guitar accents that mark out "The Darkness Was Vague". And the sudden appearance of horns is like a mirage of unexpected lyricism, carrying us into the arms of The Robot Ate Me's "Carousel Waltz".

"I Know How You Are Going To Die Tonight" is both a threat and a plea at once, an insistent folk nursery rhyme for Halloween night built on piano, violin, horns and banjo, which with its small-town-band gait could belong to early Okkervil River. "Yes, I'm Cold" is the pattering of forgotten rain on the eaves of the soul, while a fairy-tale tinkling of little bells turns into a chase of percussion with a swaying rhythm. But what truly nails itself to the beating heart of Throatsleep is the rarefied, aching arpeggio of ": A Problem In Dissonance Solved", which lets Bathgate's dark, caressing voice quiver over a backdrop of synthetic reverb.

Bathgate's nocturnal ballads chase one another across the album's two chapters, "Throat" and "Sleep", between acoustic caresses ("Buffalo Girl"), folk elegies ("Feather Jaw") and pianistic romanticism veiled in strings ("All My Friends Have Been Replaced With Cities"). "My songs take the mental shape of a vast black cloud. Writing songs, for me, is partly a habit and partly an essential element of my sanity."

Betrayal and lies, desire and prostration, comfort and silence hover like ghosts in the moonlit light of Throatsleep's verses. "I will follow every line until I have murdered every word", murmurs Bathgate in "Little Bird In Coffin Come": and the sound of every syllable carves a groove made of vivid, scorching images. Hearts seem to fall from the chest, every night seems to lead to the brink of death: “I sing most every night / When the lights are low and we all die / And die most every night / We die, we die, we die”. But the banjo of "We Die" is not a funeral dirge, it's a last gasp of hope: "One thing I’ll promise thine / Is I’ll live, I’ll live tonight".

After the release of Throatsleep (officially reissued in 2007 by local label Fox On A Hill), Bathgate toured with Saturday Looks Good To Me and was named "Best Solo Artist In Michigan" by "Real Detroit Weekly" magazine. His reputation as a performer grew night after night: following the model of artists like Joseph Arthur and Andrew Bird, Bathgate often uses onstage the technique of recording live loops to use as backing for his songs. "When I perform I typically swing between moments of extreme focus on the audience's reactions, where my body becomes like an instrument onstage, and moments of total loss of awareness of what's around me. Sometimes I completely drift away and even forget I'm playing, I just end up listening to the sounds I'm producing".

In the same period, besides a solemn rereading of the traditional "Auld Lang Syne", the American songwriter put out two more works in quick succession: while The Single Road I Long For is an excursion into more classically country and bluegrass territory, A Detailed Account Of Three Dreams previews, in a bare acoustic form, three songs destined to appear on Bathgate's next album: "The Last Wine Of Winter", "Every Wall You Own" and "Cold Fusion (Snakes)". A new step lies ahead.

My days all serpentine

It's not every day that an artist arrives at their debut on the record market with eyes already fixed upon them: especially for a songwriter who doesn't indulge in freak oddities, doesn't wink at indietronica, or doesn't sink into the nihilism of his own silences... But the acclaim garnered by Throatsleep raised anticipation around Bathgate's first release for a proper label. The one to bet on him is Quite Scientific Records of Ann Arbor, which in the summer of 2007 put out A Cork Tale Wake.

Where the outlines once appeared jagged, now sharp contours dominate: the horizon is stirred by new electric ripples and Bathgate's enveloping voice stretches over a sound as clear and tangible as ever, the fruit of his collaboration with producer and songwriter Jim Roll, also based in Ann Arbor.

Marking the break with the past are the dense, driving guitars of "Smiles Like A Fist", a rock song with an immediate, magnetic pull that seems to want to claim the legacy of Elliott Smith's "Son Of Sam". But that's not all, because Ross Huff's trumpet and Matt Jones's drums push "Every Wall You Own" and "Restless" to charge ahead with the liveliness of the Decemberists.

On A Cork Tale Wake, Bathgate reveals a surprising confidence in alternating outgoing moments with intimate retreats, where acoustic textures pair with the pathos of Colette Alexander's cello and the sudden blooming of horns.

The interplay of piano and cello on "Serpentine" could belong to the young, visionary Springsteen of "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.", while the way the Jeff Tweedy-style acoustic ballad "The Last Parade On Ann St." lets itself be smudged by electric intrusions seems to make it a secret link between "A Ghost Is Born" and "Sky Blue Sky". And when it settles into more classically country-folk rhythms, as on "Madison House" and "Do What's Easy", Bathgate's lyricism stands without hesitation alongside the lessons of Micah P. Hinson.

The lyrics of A Cork Tale Wake are sighs of desire struggling within the venomous jaws of everyday resignation. Bare rooms inhabited by old ghosts and a bottle of winter's last wine, words and glances that wound like sentences: the world of A Cork Tale Wake is one in which hope seems nothing more than a coin stolen from the bottom of the wishing well. How is it still possible to have the courage for another toss, when the water has been drained by the weight of betrayal and disillusionment? "Forget your debts, because forgiveness exists". The simplest thing is exactly what seems impossible: forgiving oneself. "Do what's easy".

A little less than a year later, the Ep Wait, Skeleton arrives as a corollary to the album, an ideal epitaph for a bony, angular sound that aims to reconcile the expressive openness of A Cork Tale Wake with the raw intensity of Bathgate's earliest homemade work. "Casual Way" and "Salt Year", amid jolts of electric guitar and sudden silences, evoke the magnetic poetry of Jeff Buckley. After the litany of "Been Out All Night", "Cold Press Rail" floats on Susan Fawcett's spectral violin, breaking against the edges of the guitar.

Bathgate weaves a new version of "Yes, I'm Cold", bringing in the banjo to give the track a rural marching flavor: Starbucks chooses it as "Pick Of The Week", marking the American songwriter's first large-scale breakthrough. Bathgate's voice recites his visions in stark tones all the way to the spare epilogue of the title track, itself a reworking of an old song dating back to Silence Is For Suckers, where it appeared as a hidden track. The skeleton hovering over his verses isn't meant for dust, but for waiting. "Love has a way of saving you".

With A Cork Tale Wake, Bathgate also lands in Europe for the first time, thanks to distribution by One Little Indian. "Serpentine" is chosen as "Song Of The Day" by the NPR network and wins favor from outlets as prestigious as the BBC and "The Independent". Bathgate takes part in folk label YerBird's compilation "Folk Music For The End Of The World", alongside rising names in American songwriting such as J. Tillman and Hezekiah Jones. It's with Hezekiah Jones (aka Raphael Cutrufello) that, over the years, a particular elective affinity is born: after sharing a double interview on the pages of OndaRock, the two will release a split vinyl in 2008 titled "The Ashville Squints", featuring one unreleased track each. And in 2011 Cutrufello will include a cover of "The Last Parade On Ann St." on his second album, "Have You Seen Our New Fort?".

Chocking down a salt

"Love vs. Time": it's along the border of this dualism that, after four years of silence, Chris Bathgate returns in the spring of 2011 with his fourth album, Salt Year. "These songs are like the battle cry for a tormented period", he explains. "Recording them was a painful and joyful experience". Bathgate goes through his salt year waging a relentless battle with himself. His return carries the flavor of a more hard-won awareness: a road picking up where it left off, venturing even deeper into the territories of that lost continent called Americana.

It all begins far back, with the arpeggio that let “Coda (Ann St. Part 2)” close the curtain on A Cork Tale Wake: those same notes now resurface in “Everything (Ouverture)”, accompanying a dialogue between horns and mandolin that Bathgate himself calls the “cornerstone” of Salt Year. From there unspools a web of echoes and suggestions, weaving the album's songs together. “It's as if the melodies become characters, not just themes. They represent people, feelings and passages of time, references to my own personal mythology, to fragments of my horizon”.

Even before the substance of the songs themselves, what strikes you about Salt Year is the thickness and depth of its weave. The pulsing drums of “Levee” feel like the approach of a distant storm's rumble, the solemn entrance of horns in “Fur Curled On The Sad Road” is cut through by a blade of electricity. And “No Silver” turns its banjo filigree into an ancient creak that marks the march. Distant echoes, silences and crescendos: the care lies in the nuances, the fruit of a meticulousness Bathgate devoted himself to for the first time directly in the studio, investing every cent to afford one extra hour of recording time.

Amid the restless questions of “Eliza (Hue)”, the piano opens the way to the choral quality of a dance led by strings. A tribute to memory from a devotee of fiddle-music tradition like Bathgate, who here introduces the album's central figure: Eliza, a feminine archetype bearing “the features of the rural American icon”. Wife, mother, idealized figure, a gaze scanning the clouds in “Poor Eliza” as evening shadows lengthen. “It's an abandoned country town. It's my highest conception of a person”.

The gait of “In The City”, accompanied by Ross Huff's trumpet, takes on the hues of the least brooding American Music Club, while the guitar ideas of “Time” are enlivened with Wilco-esque accents. Bathgate's ambitions are made clear by comparing two tracks on the new album to their earlier versions: “Own Design”, already previewed on “The Ashville Squints”, gains plasticity around a stubborn riff, while the title track, which appeared bare and rarefied on Wait, Skeleton, softens thanks to the caress of pedal steel.

Both starting point and finish line at once, “Everything (Ouverture)” brings the trajectory of Salt Year to completion: “Every love I’ve pushed away / No matter how far I stray / It still remains”. “Old love never really leaves your system, it stays inside you like a nagging motif”, Bathgate reflects. What seemed erased by time has in fact left an indelible trace. Not even pain is wasted, not even a single instant is lost.

All my footsteps they return

One step after another. Flexing and stretching out. The rhythm of breath seeking its own balance, with the slowness of a hypnotic flow. The mechanical motion of the body, the mind's free wandering.

Chris Bathgate has come a long way. Through the mountains, amid the woods, along the fog-wrapped slopes that appear on the cover of the EP marking his 2016 return, Old Factory. He lost himself in nature contemplating the New England horizon from the summit of Mount Katahdin, and taught literature in courses organized by the University of Michigan. And what about music?

Music, despite everything, never betrayed him. When he set off on his journey, he'd left behind a handful of songs recorded in Detroit alongside Chris Koltay. Bathgate finished them with Matt Aguiluz in New Orleans and finally decided to share them with everyone. “They're the mark of my exit from and return to music”, he reflects. A kind of bridge between the self of yesterday and the self of today.

Yet, from the very first notes of “Big Ghost”, it feels like coming home: the clean riffs, the solemn rhythm section, the voice's soft coiling toward the final crescendo. “Acorns” unspools with the gait of an autumnal-flavored M. Ward, left hanging and vibrating in midair on its “Hey man, Amen”. Between the transfigured Americana of Elvis Perkins and the elegiac tones of Hezekiah Jones, “Calvary” slips its questions between the folds of piano and strings: “Ain’t it good to be alive/ With the wound still in your side?”. Celebration and calvary, intertwined in a mysterious unity: “I wanted to express a sense of life's triumph”, Bathgate explains, “but without glossing over the fact that the same message can sound cynical in the darkest moments”.

It's left to Dizzy Seas, the following year, to bring the path begun with Old Factory to fruition in the shape of a proper album. “As my footsteps start to fade/ How my thoughts they drift away”, announces “Northern Country Trail”, the track chosen to preview the new record. Getting lost. Disappearing. That's what Bathgate sought along the way, and Dizzy Seas carries its echo in every note. Contours as impalpable as the Rorschach blots on the cover, atmospheric landscapes like the drift of a daydream: “I'd like the listener's mind to be able to wander freely during a song”.

The essence is still made of folk's raw material, as the ancient lyricism of the fiddle in “Water” teaches. But that subtle pulse trembling beneath the skin, that liquid expansiveness embracing the sound, belongs to a more dreamlike dimension: “Sometimes my thoughts/ Are like lights on the water”.

Like a Bon Iver who hasn't forgotten his roots, the Bathgate of Dizzy Seas then immerses himself in the journey, letting it carry him far away. The banjo of “O(h)m” opens the door to a dance with a rustic flavor, recalling the memory of his early days, the pages of Throatsleep. The electric riff marking the resolute stride of “Beg” harks back to the Americana of Salt Year and A Cork Tale Wake. Then, though, “Hide” comes floating in suspension, stretching out in midair, driven by the currents of regret: “All my wasted days come back to me/ Every hour, broken and dour, returns”.

It's a need for horizon that drives Bathgate onward. “At a certain point I started feeling more and more uncomfortable whenever I was indoors”, he recounts. “I couldn't stand the idea of having a roof over my head anymore”. There are things only the breath of open spaces can hold. “All the breathing of the night/ All the shifting of the lights/ All I need now is a sign”, pleads “Beg”.

The imposing presence of nature and solitude permeates every track: the trace of a trail through the forest, as in the video accompanying “Northern Country Trail”; the glint of water rippled by wind, as in the lyrics of “Come To The Sea”; a guitar with silver threads weaving its inlays.

A distracted listen isn't enough to appreciate the richness of Dizzy Seas's weave. Once again, the layers of Bathgate's songs demand that you go beyond the surface, from the spirals of the title track to the nervous guitar of “Tintype Crisis”, all the way to the hushed epilogue of “Nicosia”. They demand that you let go, that you look inward. That you walk through the night with your eyes full of questions: “How strange is the night?/ How strange is my time?/ How strange am I?”.

As if there was some holy center

Orpheus drives an '85 Oldsmobile. A spotless hearse to pass through the gates of the underworld. Eurydice waits for him among the peach blossoms, motionless in her white dress. The underworld takes the shape of the rows of an orchard. At the center of the field stands an old pump organ, and beside it the storyteller repeats his warning: “Don’t look back”.

Memory and oblivion, love and death, earth and sky: they're all there in the video for “Don’t Look Back”, every theme of Chris Bathgate's new album. His first in five years of silence, since the American songwriter now follows a dilated sense of time, one that seems immune to the compulsiveness of algorithms. The rhythm of life's seasons, forever awaiting fulfillment: “Ain’t it strange how the things we’ve done/ Often are a case of not enough/ That’s love, or something”.

The album cover already hints at it: that organ among the flowering branches is the real protagonist of The Significance Of Peaches. After releasing Dizzy Seas, Bathgate left Michigan for California. Before leaving, he had to sell all his instruments or pawn them. All except the organ, the one constant in a moment of radical change. When he walked into John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco, it was only natural to start again from there: “It became like the base note of a perfume,” he explains. The most enveloping trail at the heart of the olfactory pyramid.

So, starting with the opener “Sweet Fern”, it's the organ's liturgical sound that serves as a prelude to every song, like an echo of the world's breathing. And it's always the organ that guides the melodies with solemn confidence through their skeleton of beats and pulses. There are no guitars this time, but the modulations of Bathgate's voice become an instrument in their own right. Necessity becomes the record's aesthetic key, and the music proceeds by subtraction, toward a rarefied, meditative gospel.

At a certain point, though, the money ran out. It took two years before he could pick those unfinished recordings back up. Two years in which Bathgate's life changed once again: the return to Michigan, the adventure of starting a family, the birth of his first child, the pandemic. As for all of us, things took on a different perspective: the bond with places, relationships with others, the feeling of fragility. The lyrics of “Bruises”, inspired by the sense of alienation of life in San Francisco, took on the momentum of a universal cry of brotherhood: “Can’t you see it? We’re connected/ Can’t you feel it, the connection?/ We’re spinning the same direction”.

On a canoe rocked by the water at sunset, Bathgate turned his quarantine streaming sessions into a return to the land, to his roots. A chance to rediscover the humus of tradition. Likewise, on The Significance Of Peaches the fiddle creeps through the folds of “Eliza”, almost like an invocation to that personal folk muse already sung about on Salt Year. The words of Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh echo in the cover of the Dubliners' “Raglan Road”, accompanied by the synthetic singing of the keyboards. But these are mere ripples in a collection of songs that is purer and more compact than ever: “I'm simply telling the truth,” Bathgate confesses.

The peaches of the title, then, become the symbol of this journey. The search for lost time, the taste of a summer's memory suspended in the drift of the title track. The search for the pit, for one's own personal axis of the world, through the wanderings in the woods of “The Van” (“As if there was some holy center/ As if my heart were free to wander”). The search for something lasting, hidden somewhere in the flesh of existence that makes “Stone” tremble. Because for Bathgate there's nothing greater to leave a child than a peach tree, “the sweet promise of fruit that ripens with time”.

In the new millennium, it's no easy feat to stand out in the landscape of American singer-songwriter tradition without falling into the trap of roots clichés or solipsistic navel-gazing. Joseph Arthur managed it back in the days of “Come To Where I’m From”, and later it fell to Micah P. Hinson to pick up the torch: Chris Bathgate seems to want to walk that same path, plunging the blade of his own verses with surprising maturity into shadowy, passionate atmospheres.

Ride the wave of great music

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