LEVI WEAVER - The Letters Of Dr. Kurt Gödel

Albert Einstein used to say he went to Princeton just for the privilege of being able to walk home alongside Kurt Gödel. Yet he probably never imagined that one day an entire album would be dedicated to the Austrian mathematician… Gödel can hardly be called a typical rock icon: and yet his famous incompleteness theorems revolutionized our conception of science, defying every attempt to reduce reason to a mere measurement.

Put in terms that might horrify a mathematician, Gödel showed that every coherent logical system contains elements that cannot be proven from within the system itself. In practice, his theorems lead to the realization that every system is, by its very nature, incomplete. That doesn't mean truth is impossible to reach: rather, according to Gödel, truth is something that always lies outside the system, or more precisely at its origin.

And this brings us to the reason why American songwriter Levi Weaver chose to draw inspiration from Gödel for what stands as the most ambitious and complex album of his (young) career: the incompleteness of reason is, in fact, the crucial point of the search his songs grapple with. "I think this story begins with the search for meaning," he explains. "Things we think are the missing piece, the final link in the chain toward happiness, whatever you want to call it."

Levi Weaver's life has the shape of the most genuine American stories: the son of a preacher who traveled from rodeo to rodeo with his family in tow in an RV to save the souls of cowboys, he grew up singing in the church choir and listening to country stations on the radio. "The Letters Of Dr. Kurt Gödel" is his third proper album, an existential concept record on multiple levels, in which philosophical musings always retain the familiar traits of lived experience. "It's like a novel with different chapters and themes," Weaver confirms. "I think each song stands on its own, but you can grasp its meaning better if you consider it against the backdrop of the story as a whole."

Weaver's vulnerable, quavering voice evokes the emotional songwriting of Tom McRae, while the arrangements recall the baroque grandeur of Get Well Soon. It's precisely this temptation toward grandiosity that is the biggest limitation of his songs: but when the tones become leaner, as in "Good From Evil" or "Spirit First (Sincerely, K.)", Weaver's lyrics truly manage to get to the essence.

The pathos of the opening "String Theory" immediately places the starting point of the journey at the center: "Logic has left us for dead in the street". Logic alone isn't enough, it can't on its own exhaust the full breadth of reason: we need to start again from the heart, suggests the crescendo of "We're Tornadoes When We Dance", from that chemical tangle that writhes as if trying to break out of the cage of the chest. "You can't ignore its questions if you want to feel honest with yourself," Weaver notes.

Being faithful to the heart's impulse means, first and foremost, being willing to accept the possibility that there might be an answer to those questions, the possibility that there exists a truth truly capable of setting us free. "If the truth is what you're looking for, you don't get to choose the answers anymore", sings Weaver, and with a brass-band fanfare "Apostate" strides forward as a sturdy rock ballad.

The seemingly irreconcilable clash between faith and reason, in "Good From Evil", leaves man divided, broken and powerless, like a child facing a cruel divorce ruling. "Is faith just another one of those things we try to stick meaning onto when there isn't any? Or is it something else?", Weaver asks himself. A question that can only be answered by coming to recognize that faith, at its core, is nothing other than an essential category of reason itself.

On the driving march of "An Incompleteness Theorem", the journey thus reaches its epilogue: according to Gödel's lesson, the incompleteness of reason is not its negation, but on the contrary an opening onto ever new questions. And the fact that truth cannot be locked inside a box doesn't mean no answer exists: "Every answer looks a lot like another question / But I can't stop asking, I can't stop asking".

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16/10/2011