"It's who you leave behind, it's not who you save/That you'll be judged by."
In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut coined the term "a nation of two" to describe that stage of love in which a couple seems to be creating their own self-contained world, with its own language and culture. In Franz Nicolay's haunted and redemptive new album Luck & Courage (out October 12, on CD from Team Science Records and vinyl from Sabot Productions), he expands the idea and writes the history of the rise and fall of one such country, one inhabited by the titular characters Felix & Adelita - in Latin and Spanish, luck & courage.
"They're untethered," Nicolay says of the protagonists. "She's a sometime bartender, he's been in the service, he's a little violent and she's a little distant; they don't really live in any one place - and they've accustomed themselves, at some point, to the idea that ultimately their lives are going to their own responsibility, so that when they find themselves together, almost against their will, their nation of two is doomed before it even begins. They're so used to leaving things behind, they don't remember how to stay - a battle between the pull of domesticity and the habit of packing up and moving on. And so their story, and the story of their nation of two, becomes the story of a plague-ridden, Cormac McCarthyian country as its society collapses."
FRANZ NICOLAY was a member of Brooklyn rockers The Hold Steady and punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society. He founded the new-music collective Anti-Social Music, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2010; and is co-leader of the Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, whose Fight Dirty came out in 2009. Also in 2009, he released his solo debut Major General (Fistolo/Decor) and vinyl-only EP St. Sebastian of the Short Stage (Team Science); and in early 2010 the short-story collection Complicated Gardening Techniques (Julius Singer Press). He made Luck & Courage in Brooklyn in two weeks in spring 2010, with producer Jim Keller (Willie Nelson, Franz Ferdinand). After completing the new album, he spent the past summer as a touring member of agit-punk band Against Me!.
"It is not raining, my shoe is not untied/I have not been unhappy my whole life."
Nicolay on the sound of Luck & Courage: "One of the records I was thinking of when I was conceptualizing how I wanted this to sound is Lyle Lovett's I Love Everybody. That record uses a simple drum kit with brushes, bass and Lovett playing guitar and singing. So there's that sort of classic country rhythm section. And then a string quartet that's playing the kind of arrangements you'd have on a big, lush '70s Nashville record, but compacted, since it's done with four players instead of a 50-piece orchestra. I thought that was a really neat way of reinterpreting that sort of lushness, while retaining this really stringent, humble arrangement." Another reference was 16 Horsepower's Low Estate: "The banjo and accordion from 16 Horsepower, and their sense of Old Testament judgment and moral objectivity (which I realize is, for them, explicitly religious) informs what is sort of the blackness at the heart of the Luck & Courage, the sense that our choices in the past inexorably determine our futures; even if it ends on a redemptive note.
"I wanted to use the orchestration to fill in some of the character development and scene-setting that isn't explicit in the lyrics, like you might in a film score; for example, the Morricone/mariachi of "Have Mercy" places the action in a semi-mythical Mexican borderland. Also, you can use orchestration to destabilize a song, in a productive way, to introduce harmonic ambiguity that isn't there in the basic chords ("James Ensor Redeemed"), in a way that registers as emotional or moral ambiguity (I thought Nico Muhly did that really effectively on the most recent Sam Amidon album.)"
"When you leave again, leave something of you with them."
Nicolay's band on Luck & Courage is Brian Viglione (The Dresden Dolls) on drums, Yula Be'eri (World/Inferno Friendship Society) on bass and Maria Sonevytsky (The Debutante Hour) on piano. Other guests on the record include Mark Spencer (Son Volt) on pedal steel, trumpeter Ben Holmes, guitarist Jared Scott (Demander), Ken Thomson (Gutbucket) on saxophones; and featuring cellist Emily Hope Price (Pearl and the Beard), who co-writes and duets with Nicolay on "Z for Zachariah," a love song from a plague to its victims.
"It's easy to be kind when your heart has some purchase."
Nicolay has been hailed as a charismatic "born performer," "a storyteller and entertainer in the cabaret and vaudevillian tradition," and he'll be touring with a full band for the first time in late October and November. From the stoic pathos of "This Is Not A Pipe" and the small-town grotesque of "My Criminal Uncle" to the ferocious noir of "Have Mercy" and the tender marriage ballad "The Last Words of Gene Autry," Luck & Courage marks his arrival as an aphoristic and heart-wrenching songwriter to be reckoned with. |
