I listened to Sarah-Beth Tomberlin's debut album, At Weddings, pretty much on a loop at work yesterday. It's simplicity itself. Just Tomberlin's emotive but affectingly toneless voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar and otherwise the most minimal of musical support imaginable . Each and every track follows the same basic template. I guess if it was really that easy however, everyone would be doing it. And frankly they're not. Singer-songwriter confessional albums as good as this only come down the pike every once in a while.
That much became readily apparent to me as early as the third track Tornado. This. I believe, was pretty much the first complete song Tomberlin ever wrote, at 19 on her parent's piano in Illinois. It's all sparse economy in musical and lyrical terms. At Weddings is a model lesson in how little you need in terms of musical artillery to make a truly great record. .
Virtually every review of the record, (which came out a week ago), has made much of Tomberlin's own biographical background. The daughter of a Baptist pastor and subject of by all accounts a pretty strict Christian upbringing, which this record i,s to a greater or lesser degree, a reaction to. The album can be seen as an artist mapping out their own path at just the moment in life when such things need to be done if there is something you want and something you need to make a break from. Whether this would have been readily apparent from its lyrics alone isn't immediately clear. However, the poignancy and deeply felt nature of the songs is abundantly plain.
Although Tomberlin's playlists on Spotify are crammed with songs from contemporary artists, (Courtney Barnett, Snail Mail, Laura Marling, Lorde and U.S.Girls), the antecedents for what I hear on the record go back much further. To Judee Sills, Joni Mitchell and the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters of the early Seventies. There's a lucid clarity here that you assume even Laughing Len might have appreciated.
Most of all, you get the sense that here is an artist undergoing that peculiar and specific anguish that we all, (or at least I assume so), experience so uniquely in late adolescence, our at once blossoming yet declining late-teenage years. When every kiss and every setback has a particular sweet pain and clarity, amid all the intense confusion. It's no wonder that the best 'Coming of Age' films, literature and music resonate so deeply.
I was seventeen once, though believe me it feels a mighty long time ago. Frankly, because it was. But I remember distinctly buying Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain when it came out at about that time and how I felt it was the best record ever made about being a boy of that age. Perhaps thirty five years down the line, Tomberlin has just released the female equivalent. There's even a song called Seventeen on it. What more could you possibly want?
Just like Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame, Sarah-Beth Tomberlin has wisdom beyond her years, the key circumstance required to make art of this kind resonate beyond its 'just a phase they're going through' constraints. Because whatever else is here, there's not a note of self-pity. There's also no little clarity and poise. Tomberlin and At Weddings join the back of the ever-swelling 'coming of age' queue behind Carson McCullers, J.D.Salinger, Benjamin Braddock, Nick Drake, Judee Sills and Roddy himself.
What this record clearly evidences is that art of this kind will never stop being made. How could it? There will always after all be a generation that's 'coming of age'. And each and every one will imagine that it's going through a set of emotions that no generation that's gone before has. And after all they're pretty much correct in that respect. Hence the need for fresh expressions of that particular crucible of experience.
At Weddings seems set to get my rosette come December for Record of the Year in this particular category. It will also be incredibly interesting to see where Tomberlin goes next. Some artists struggle through their whole careers aiming to make a statement as resonant and powerful as this one. She's achieved it, apparently effortlessly, (though I'm sure that's not the case), with her first shy at the coconuts. Watch her go!
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