Benjamin Gibbard remembers the summer of 1997 as the summer of Either/Or,
Elliott Smith's magnum opus the photo album he flicks through when he wants to
remember the life and times of that year — so many years, now, receded into
the distance. Jeff Hanson's songs make it seem like he may've spent that whole
summer listening to Either/Or over and over, but his singing makes it
seem like the summer of 2005 will be synonymous, for so many, with this self-titled
record. Hanson's voice is warm and welcoming, immediately familiar and instantly
unforgettable, never forgotten as it plays on in your mind, ringing in your ears,
serenading the silence in the space between you and the other humans, between
you and the wall, you and the windowpane, you and the streets you walk on. His
singing takes wing and warbles in measures so high most men'd fear to tread there;
this high-voiced boy bashfully strums and murmurs through the saddest of sad
songs, played slow and strung-out long, these doleful strums set to summer's
slow heartbeat, kept to the cadence of the languid and the lazy. As each new
day births an orange sun, squeezing out its juices, its color, as it casts it
skyward in a glow of white, Hanson's voice is there, wrapping its way around
action and event, entwining with time, becoming one with the times it's played
in, less the soundtrack to some summer than the memory of that summer itself.
The metaphor grows whole as the album's whole becomes clear; it's important that
it closes on "Something About," where over eight mournful minutes Hanson hits
vocal/aesthetic heights as he sings a lullaby for a fleeting love — a summer's
love, cast in a love of summer — who's departed like the season itself;
he eulogizes all that has come before, in the album, in the song, in the relationship
sung of in the song, and in the summer of 2005 itself. The simple chords and
words are simply the keys to unlock the complexity of memory, such simplicity
perhaps proof positive that it is the right words — the right combinations,
the right incantations — that unleash the spells that syllables are laced
with. Hanson's voice makes the apparently prosaic — "I remember summer/
Everything is over/ So you can keep it all/ Keep it all/ Yourself" — astonishingly
poetic, resonant in a way that can't be translated to page, can't be measured
by standard standards. Like how a snapshot, all bad composition and red-eyes
and hideous Kodak color, can be the most beautiful photograph ever taken for
the person who took it, or the souls within that it took. |
