House on Fire
originally published September 2010
Brian Wright and the things he lost, and gained, in the fire
Brian Wright, who plays Saint Rocke Thursday night.
According to a theorem laid down by the late great Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt, the world of song can be broken down most essentially into two broad categories: there’s the blues, and there’s zippety do da.
Brian Wright doesn’t do zippety do da. His new album, House on Fire, is a strange and incredibly beautiful blues record. But not blues as a genre but as a well-worn philosophy – say Beatles “Yer Blues” territory mixed with some Merle Haggard, roughed up with a little Blind Willie and sweetened with just a hint of Andy Griffith, because after all Wright is southern gentleman, hailing from Lorena, Texas.
Like Van Zandt, Wright is wandering down that road between hope and heartbreak. Unlike Van Zandt, Wright comes down on the side of hope. Barely.
Take “Mesothelioma”, a song on the new record. It’s about cancer, first of all. “She got a settlement, got Mesothelioma,” Wright sings. “She gonna buy some land in eastern Oklahoma. She used to love a man, but he got carcinoma, and he’s dead and gone, rest his soul…”
It may be damning with faint hope, but the chorus says something oddly but truly hopeful:
“I hope that if you get a disease, you get the medicine that you need
Surrounded by your friends and your dreams, good lord,
‘til you’re gone, dead and gone,
Rest your soul.”
Beat-up and mostly unbowed real flesh and blood people emerge in Wright’s songs, taking punches, spitting blood and stumbling forward. He makes poetry from unlikely sources.
“That came from staying up too late watching TV, man,” Wright said of “Mesothelioma”. “They always run those ads, those cheesy lawyer ads, and that word always sounded musical to me. I’d run around the house singing mesothelioma, then all of a sudden it became a song that meant something. It’s funny, because when I play that song live the band sings four part harmony. And well…I don’t know for a fact, but I am fairly confident the word mesothelioma has never been sung before in four part harmony.”
After the song came out earlier this year, a fan told him the song had really meant something to her.
“She went through a bout with cancer, and I had written that song before I knew that, but when she got the song she thought it was funny,” Wright said. “She actually got through it but it was no easy feat and it appeared pretty bleak, apparently, but she came out on the other side and listened to that song and loved it.”
Wright, who plays Saint Rocke tonight, is not interested in being pretty. House on Fire is a record that shines a bright light from a dark place. Wright usually plays with his band, the Waco Tragedies. But on this one he was going where nobody else could go; several songs feature friends sitting in, but he played most the instruments on the record. He’d been touring relentlessly, solo, and he came off the road without a proper home to speak of. Somebody, something, was missing.
“I didn’t really want to be around people,” Wright said. “I just wanted to go and make music. And a lot of those songs, you know, they are apologies or they are angry. There was definitely a lot of heartbreak in there, but hopefully some hope as well…The record is such a heartbreak record, but you know, I don’t want to be that weepy guy. Because it’s so easy, everybody is writing these love songs they don’t believe, man. And I’m hoping at least when I write one it’s believable. Part of me is kicking myself for having written another fucking love song, because there’s a million of them are better than anything I will ever write.”
This is not true, actually. Brian Wright is one of the finest songwriters we have now. When you wonder where the next generation is going to arise that replaces some of the titans that have passed – such as Van Zandt – Wright is real a candidate to become that kind of songwriter. He’s a poet who plays badass guitar and ranges from country to rock to blues and most definitely avoids zippity do da. As his fellow songwriter and sometime collaborator Joe Firstman has said, “Brian Wright is the truth.”
And so the story of House on Fire goes like this: Wright didn’t have a car, or a home, but songs, as they always do, were pouring out of him. They seemed to arrive mostly after midnight. He’d call up his friend Mike Vizcarra, a producer who has a studio in Laurel Canyon. “I’m working on a song,” Wright would say. “I really want to come record.” Vizcarra would sigh. “Finish it in 15 minutes and I’ll come get you,” he’d reply.
Ten minutes later the song would be done and Vizcarra would be on his way to pick up Wright. Much of the record was recorded, in this manner, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.
There are songs on House on Fire that will be sung long from now. “Mean Old Wind” is one of those songs that is so perfect that it seems to have always been there. We just hadn’t heard it before: “The winds gonna blow/where the winds gonna blow/and the winds gonna blow all day/You can’t do much but try to find cover when the wind don’t blow your way/The wind blow loud and the wind blow heavy and strange/Lost my friend to the mean old wind that carried her away.”
“Mean Old Wind it pretty much lost love is all it is. It’s a simple theme,” Wright said. “Think about what you lost and how you lost it and you start to think about where you fucked up this thing, because it’s easy to blame the other person. Mean Old Wind is basically me, me being an asshole. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s somebody that means a lot to you and you just lose them to this series of winds and swirls and just all this mess and you don’t see it happening but eventually it will just blow away.”
But there is a counterbalance. Two other songs — “Live Again” and “Friend” – also somehow seem to have been inevitable and are bruised but sweetly hopeful. When Van Zandt sang of wind – “Ride the blue wind, high and free/It’ll take you down, to misery” – it pretty much went one direction. Wright is hanging on for dear life, heading aloft again.
“It does, man, it does all balance out,” he said. “The wind will carry you wherever. It’s never going to be what you think it is going to be, ever, but it usually works out fine as long as you don’t stop. Just let it keep carrying you. You are going to fuck things up, and you are going to do beautiful things. And hopefully that part will even out, too.”
Brian Wright plays Saint Rocke tonight. For more information see www.brianwrightmusic.com. ER