In the fall of 1993, Bay Guardian arts editor Kevin Berger asked a dozen of us who had been writing about music in San Francisco to reflect on our favorite album of the past five years. Souled American came to mind. In part I wrote
Take Souled American’s Flubber. If it was ambient, it was a gnarly, moldy ambience, hiccupping up Pabst at odd intervals. The pure fungus of it began to grow on me: it had a falling-down-the stairs, landing-on-it-feet kind of coherence. Deconstructed folk music, a postmodern Music from Big Pink with Studio One bass and Garth Hudson with nothing to play but a broken-down pump organ. Is this how the music sounded before it got pushed in front of a microphone? Probably not. Straining, barely in-tune vocals, an errantly plucked mandolin riff, the reverberated antithesis of a power chord. Lost soul music.
Aside from the deadpan joy and unpredictable creakiness of it all, what has probably kept me listening is that I just don’t have the slightest idea what they’re singing about. Do I care? There have always been plenty of easy answers floating around in pop music (see “hook”). Flubber sounds like it’s having a hard time posing a question. I can respect that kind of confusion.
I didn’t go looking for Souled American. They found me. Fell into my hands in a room at the Crest Hotel in Austin in 1990. A friend of a friend who worked for Rough Trade while there was still a Rough Trade to work for was handing out cassettes of Rough Trade artists. I guess all the hip stuff had been scooped up because all that was left was Flubber (1989) and Around the Horn (1990), Souled American’s second and third records. I’d a minute-long conversation with the band’s drummer Jamey Barnard the night before, in front of a club where they’d just opened for Cowboy Mouth—which from this distance seems the oil and water mix of all time.
Maybe I played one of the tapes on the drive back to New Orleans. Weird stuff. Bent tones from all directions, the vocals wavering and warbling, the electric guitars deeply reverberant. The bass was frequently pushed to the front of the mix and seemed to be constantly searching for the “correct” note while taking obvious pleasure in not quite arriving there.
You couldn’t say the songs on Flubber and Around the Horn were arranged. Their organization and forward motion seemed more random than conscious. The slow stuff—well—it was really slow. My only frame of reference at the time for something moving at this kind of glacial rate was Nick Lowe’s “Endless Sleep”. That was a goof, right?
If these guys were goofing on us, their delivery was exceedingly dry. They just seemed to like playing really, really slowly, in a way that slowed down just how you listened to them. How was I to know: Souled American was just beginning to get truly slow? That these were their pop albums?
Souled American’s story is certainly an American one. Remember Lee Audrey “Speed” Riggs’ old ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes, all jive-talkin’ auctioneer rap, then his clarion conclusion, “Sold American!” Of course not—you’re not 90 years old. Then how about Kinky Friedman and Billy Joe Shaver’s “Sold American” from 1973? “Writing down your memoirs/on some window in the frost.” Memos from the lost highway.
It is the American tale of moving, by fits and spurts, to a somewhat mysterious conclusion: “No”. Like Melville’s Bartleby. “I’d prefer not”. Like Thoreau in his lonesome shack in the shade. Like Lew Welch—”I went Southwest” (not).
Indeed, Souled American’s career arc mirrored Herman Melville’s. Almost popular, an adventurous debut, then diminishing commercial returns and decreasing visibility with each succeeding release. Then, silence. Souled American records since 1996: zero. Were principals Chris Grigoroff and Joe Adducci toiling in the Midwestern equivalent of a customs house? Composing their Billy Budd by a corn country Walden? Wandering the Sierra foothills with a handgun, turkey buzzards circling? There was no way to tell.
In an age when everything you’ve ever wanted to know and much you don’t can be found with a half-diligent Google search, Souled American had left barely a mirage, a thin whisp of smoke. A cut on a Kristofferson tribute. No gigs for 25 years, other than a few alleged appearances in tiny hamlets deep in the Rockies. No way to purchase their catalog without paying someone in Finland to ship a 100-euro CD to you.
Souled American Remerges from Its Faded Past
Until now. Some 29 years after their last LP, Omnivore Records has released Rise Above It: A Souled American Anthology, a collection drawing 20 songs from their six extant albums. It is a long overdue re-introduction to a singular sound and aesthetic.
Rise Above It traces Souled American’s work chronologically. It is a helpful approach to understanding the band’s unusual evolution and a study in resonance, echo, and disintegration.
The band’s key features are visible from the anthology’s initial cut, “Notes Campfire“: Grigoroff’s plaintive vocals, Adducci’s elastic bass as the lead instrument, and a chorus that sounds like shape note singing.
While the band peaked commercially with modest sales of a first album and slid slowly toward invisibility, in a market sense, this is no more useful a lens into Souled American’s growth than pointing out that Melville’s Typee sold more copies than Moby Dick. Three and a half decades of listening to Souled American has left me less confused than I was by Flubber in 1993 and more in awe of their achievement. Rise Above It is a wonder-inducing, head-scratching consolidation of that achievement.
Souled American was formed in 1986 around the nucleus of guitarist-singer-songwriter Grigoroff and bassist-singer-songwriter Adducci. Grigoroff and Adducci grew up in downstate Illinois, and after a stint in a college town reggae band, joined in Chicago with guitarist Scott Tuma and drummer Jamey Barnard.
From the beginning, the band combined eclectic influences. Grigoroff had come up playing harmonica in old time string band music, Adducci’s mother was a country songwriter. Barnard had a propensity for a sort of upside-down beat that’s difficult for anyone not native to Kingston or southern Louisiana to master. Tuma was new to the Fender Telecaster and guitars in general, which proved its own important ingredient. He rarely played anything resembling lead guitar but offered indelible and sometimes disorienting color to everything he touched.
After increasingly successful Chicago-area gigs in 1987, a demo convinced Robin Hurley of Rough Trade US to make Lucinda Williams and Souled American the UK label’s first American signings. Three Souled American albums followed in the course of 18 months: Fe (1988), Flubber (1989), and Around the Horn (1990). Following the 1992 release of Sonny, the band’s final record for Rough Trade, Jamey Barnard left the band.
Frozen was released in 1994 on the German label Moll Tontrager, which in 1996 also released the band’s final new album to date, Notes Campfire, by which time the band had stripped down largely to Grigoroff and Adducci alone. Souled American’s journey began in something (almost) resembling the prototype of a traditional alt-country rock band. By the time of the release of Frozen, they had become a sort of ambient, musique concrete take on Americana.
In 1997, flummoxed by Souled American’s lack of recognition, writer Camden Joy and Mark Lerner of the Rag and Bone Shop collaborated on 50 Posters about Souled American. These were literal posters plastered about Manhattan by Joy, Lerner, and compatriots from Lerner’s band Flat Old World. These posters extolled the virtues and qualities of Souled American’s music and ghost presence in the world at large. The posters came to a total of 64 eventually, and although 11 writers contributed text, Joy (aka Tom Adelman) scripted roughly 80%.
The first poster in the series states that Souled American’s songs “[s]eem to be about fragmentation”. True. However, in addition, the songs themselves embody fragmentation. They are literally fragmented, jerking forward when they seem to have stopped, notes appearing as singular, isolated, and dissonant sounds, half-time, half-finished arpeggios punctuating and finishing half-stated lyrics and meaning. It can take minutes for a song to fade out, the aural equivalent of watching an ox-drawn wagon disappear in the distance over a horizon on very flat land.
Souled American’s music almost always proceeds at a walking pace. Whereas their earlier work sometimes approximated a forward-leaning amble—albeit at an eccentric gait–by Frozen things were down to a plodding stagger, with forward motion only one of several options. OK—I get it—this doesn’t sound real appealing. Maybe this is one reason why listenership seemed to fall off as their catalog increased.
Bear with me. By slow, I don’t mean to suggest that the music is boring or that the experience of listening is like watching paint dry. Not at all. Souled American’s pace is halting at times, but its intentions are pretty intentional and pretty mysterious.
Souled American has been described as an alternative country band, and there’s some truth to that statement. Their melodies are clearly American plainsong folk, and they surfaced just as Americana was poking through the soil in the guise of outfits like Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown. As Zach Schonfeld asserted in 2008, “there’s little commercially viable about the band’s brand of lethargic country.”
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has described the band as embodying “an almost cosmic sadness.” The exact appeal of Souled American seems to stump some of its most ardent fans. Theodore McDermott published a short piece on the band in The Believer in 2008, in which he admitted to having reduced his operational music library to Souled American. McDermott states”
I do not mean that I have listened to them often or a lot. I mean this: when I listen to music, I listen to Souled American. I mean that I spend multiple hours per day listening, over and over again, to these albums.
And the thing is, I’m not even sure I like them.
At one point on Frozen, Grigoroff drawls this sentiment: “I’m feeling so lucky/ to be feeling/ mis’rable” (“Lucky”). What to do with a chorus and hook like that?
Cut loose from Rough Trade, looking at a release on a tiny German label, recording in a friend’s basement, Frozen seems a moment when the band doubles down on its native and natural contrariness. Six of Frozen’s song titles are comprised of a single word. They are more about states of being than narrative songcraft, though bits and pieces of narrative leak out around the edges. By Frozen, Souled American’s guitars seem to offer notes chiefly to hear then decay in the abundant and surrounding silence and space.
Lead vocals are shared equally between Grigoroff and Adduci across Frozen’s tracks. Rarely do the two sing together or provide harmony for each other, a departure from Souled American’s earliest work. When their voices do come together, it feels like an organic affirmation of a stifled but still vibrant life force.
Adducci’s mother, Vicki, contributes one song to Frozen, as had become usual on Souled American recordings, and “Sitdown”—here co-written with Joe Adducci – is the most straightforward tune on the record. Still, the singer suggests that he needs to “sit down/and give my words/a good talking to.” Not exactly country top 40 fodder.
“Heyday”, one of two tracks from Frozen included on Rise Above It, may, as its lyrics attest, be about “a day/when I shout hey”, or about Adducci’s allergy attacks. As the final song on Frozen, strummed on unprocessed acoustic guitars in a straightforward manner, even a bit upbeat in tempo (OK—relatively upbeat), “Heyday” comes across as tongue-in-cheek, inscrutable, hopeful, and elegiac all at once. It concludes”
Got to be the hardest thing/to live down/the best days of your life
To lay down/the best plays of your life
Frozen is evocative of something very Midwestern and agrarian. “It’s hard enough/to plow/a frozen field”, Frozen begins. Souled American is trying (in all senses). Like some country people, they don’t want to look too directly in your face while they’re talking to you or let you see them sweat. It is music that would seem to be easy to untangle, given its pace and spare arrangements, but the effect is just the opposite.
Rise Above It collects roughly a third of the songs Souled American released between 1988 and 1996 on their six albums. The rare rumors leaked from the Souled American camp (wherever that is?) insinuate they are working on a seventh album. “Sorry State”, a Souled American tune released just months ago on Bandcamp, is a promising indication that’s the case. Grigoroff’s vocal displays both a startling power and the slip-sliding relationship to straight time evident in the best of Souled American, and that is clearly Adducci’s bass undertaking similar guerilla action.
Jeff Tweedy, writing in World Within a Song (2023) about Adducci’s “Before Tonight”—the lead cut on Notes Campfire and a highlight among many others on Rise Above It–says”
It’s the perfect combination of the metaphysical and the mundane—the cosmic and the commonplace. In general, it’s about time. And how time moves at maddeningly inconsistent speeds dependent upon our moods and states of mind.
This is more than a description of one Souled American song. It’s a description of their entire discography. Listening to Souled American, I’ve sometimes felt like a farmer listening for rain. This is not just a listening posture in response to Souled American—it is what the band sounds like they are engaged in as they record. The music moves in response to itself in tiny increments but inexorably, like a vast distant cloud front, music to fly through, lost in time, enveloped. Difficulty in the heartland, pleasure in single notes and wayward pitch, wavering intention/attention, winter wheat, and heydays.
Many scattered responses to Souled American begin with lines like, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Souled American lately”.
Me too.
Works Cited
Darnielle, John. “The Mountain Goats: How Souled American’s Flubber Changed My Life”. Harp. Sept/Oct 2006.
Joy, Camden. Lost Joy. Verse Chorus. 2015.
McDermott, Ted. “Spare Songs From a Diminished Land”. The Believer: Issue 55. 01 July 2008.
Santa, Tracy. Souled American’s Flubber. The Bay Guardian. 19 September 1993.
Schonfeld, Zach. “Souled American’s ‘Around the Horn’ Is Moody”. PopMatters. 22 Feb 2008.
Tweedy, Jeff. World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. Dutton. 2023.
