Eric Wood - Letters From The Earth

Oh, how the lights

on the river tonight

make me feel like a dreamer again

Stay with me here, by the river tonight

and we’ll wait for the world

to end

And we’ll dream

Eric Wood è stato qui.

Just a handful of rides on the carousel, praise from connoisseurs like iridescent postage stamps, small provincial stages. In the busiest stretch of his endless highway, he was seen crossing Italian skies like a wistful meteor. In the infinite cosmos of music history, the same profile of a mild-mannered gentleman and an identical fading trajectory. His whole wanderer's baggage packed into a guitar case, just as when, at sixteen, he found himself freed from the urgency of a perpetual quarantine and began carrying his songs around the coffee houses and colleges of Ohio, then on to the San Francisco of the early hippies. In the golden years of his twenties he found a fortunate landing in Nashville, the Music City par excellence, just in time to discover that it would turn out to be little more than a rest stop.

Experience was condemning him to a restless pilgrimage, to a curiosity that never was satisfied. Experience as the sole curse of a life spent taking its first steps anew every single day. The freshly baked country music served at the court of Kris Kristofferson could never really be his bread and butter: too bland in flavor, too accommodating for a restless soul like his. The contract was scrapped. Those couple of records recorded for Capricorn went to hell like the ghosts of a Christmas never celebrated, and thank goodness for that. If the unorthodox jazz of Dave Brubeck or Nina Simone was a dazzling flash of insight, the real guiding star shone from around Greenwich Village, and it was there that Eric found his true dimension.

A minstrel by evening in the bars of the East Village, by night a cabdriver like a non-alienated Travis Bickle: with the holy cards of Dylan, Phil Ochs, David Blue and Tim Hardin lined up on his ideal dashboard, and with no copies of "The Silver Tongue Devil And I" stashed away for whichever Betsy happened to be around. His long New York season unfolded like a garland hidden by the tree-of-heaven in a city courtyard. He arrived quietly, following the trail and the legend of Tim Buckley, and only moved on after the death of that overlooked son, whom he had seen perform, still green, in a Manhattan club, and by whom he was genuinely struck. That evening the two shared a brief but uneasy chat: two singers orphaned by the same father without being brothers, or even half-brothers, with him cast in the rather awkward role of the devoted one, oblivious to the other's suffering. Not even five years later, everything would change.

1997, a watershed year, consigned Baby Jeff to the same mocking posthumous cult as Tim, while, laboring away in his usual shadow, Eric treated himself to a hard-won debut album at nearly forty-five, along with the modest spotlight of tours with Richard Thompson, Donovan, Suzanne Vega and the Smithereens. The Big Apple, an infection finally tamed. Thanks in large part to increasingly frequent retreats into the Catskill Mountains, where, like a latter-day Thoreau, Wood had built, with unexpected skill, a welcoming wooden home, blending the technique of the American pioneers with a more distinctly Northern European approach.

Distant approaches wedded in a harmonious synthesis, that same special ingredient found in "Letters From The Earth": within this weave of genres lies the work of an amiable singer-songwriter turned carpenter, a patient builder of verses and a skilled craftsman of the refrain. Binding it all together is his guitar, invaluable in carving out emotions with precise, wide-ranging strokes. And then there's that voice, so remarkably versatile it becomes the most expressive instrument on the record, a liquid tenor capable of both steady melodic control and unimaginable shifts between the shadowy and the ethereal, unfurling slowly, around every bend.

A voice that often dares, chasing the well-worn glimmers of so many singer-songwriter flashes ("Forgotten Blues"). A voice that darkens to reinvent itself as an atmospheric element in one final, deep spell ("Out Of The Blues"), a night thick with distant ghosts bound to reveal a curious kinship both with the mesmerizing abyss of Tim's "Blue Afternoon" and with the aching "unfinished" pieces of Jeff's Sketches, though without their hysteria. A voice that cuts through silence and asks for nothing more than a subtly measured, almost danceable accompaniment, somewhere between brush-stroked jazz, Latin languor, and processions of soft lights and vibes.

From the years of Caribe or of Belafonte spinning on his mother's turntable, a love was shaped for rhythms and tempos to which sophisticated songwriters have often, as a matter of principle, denied any right of citizenship. Eric, instead, drew from them just the right nourishment against the risk of a widespread expressive and human short-sightedness. Another cure was the road. The one in "Voodoo Wind", which, as in Joni Mitchell's "Hejira", becomes a metaphor for the journey, and for destiny. The one sung in the personal manifesto of "Endless Highway" as a hypothesis of solidarity, a "going out toward the world and toward people" that only thirty years of clear-eyed, untamed Americana could have made so vibrant.

The confidence behind such a well-crafted mini-compendium betrays the hand of a veteran, not a debutant impostor, equally at ease in dazzling harmonic patterns as in the faintest of whispers. Taken together, these Letters form a delicate correspondence of minimal suggestions, a collection of heart-stopping moments, a seesaw marathon. Some unfold with a pressing, playful vitality that stays disciplined and never overreaches, like sensual South American dances dressed up with reinforced acoustic textures. Others appear bare from the start, exposed to the rigors of an unyielding winter with a powerful bite.

The closing track is a quick note of stark folk, voice and guitar of pure substance, the kind of thing listeners would hear all too much of in the years to come. Just a farewell, though, after a wealth of hypnotic, impressionistic sounds, intimate and hazy pages or romantically desperate ones, illustrations for dreamers that celebrate the Cherokee ancestry running hot in the singer's blood, while also paying tribute to what is perhaps the most underrated of the Buckley Srs. ("Look At The Fools"). And then there are balancing acts of space and density, blues songs charmingly tipsy with gospel colorings ("Time Comes"), classic lightweight dissertations with skittering vocal touches ("Too Deep"), or sketches drafted in strict adherence to the almost mystical models of the old Urban Folk tradition.

Everywhere it leaves its mark like a strong essence, the warmth of an enchantment that now gives no quarter. Even within the skeptical folds of the least benevolent Mark Twain, the one who unwittingly lent the title. Even inside that superb anthem dedicated, ironically, to his own disenchantment: a ballad for artist and thoughts, a grief-stricken yet sublime prayer of solitude, blessed by the glow of a moon finally full. The same magnetism Eric always carried with him on stage. The same naturalness that would lead him — as early as his second album — to beg to be quickly forgotten. For the many who lived through these years entirely unaware of his passing through, granting his wish surely wasn't a problem. The others, perhaps, will remember him like a fruit tree that still blossoms, even though it's no longer there.

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