Laura Kerry
Will Graefe has spent much of the last decade on the road. Touring as the guitarist for bands such as Okkervil River, Star Rover, Petra Haden, Jesse Harris, and Landlady, he has traveled all around the continent and grown accustomed to seeing things from a moving vehicle.
In his first full-length as a solo act, Graefe captures his observations from the road in a concise and contemplative album, North America. The guitarist wrote the songs while on the move but returned home to Brooklyn to record his songs at Figure 8, where he welcomed collaborators including Shahzad Ismaily (Sam Amidon and Damien Rice), Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic and Okkervil River), and others. The resulting work contains both a sense of immediacy and a polished and full sound.
North America is, in many ways, the album one would expect from its origin story. The record reflects all of the yearning, restlessness, isolation, and beauty that comes with wandering from place to place across a large and varied continent. Graefe’s work fits neatly into the Americana tradition, combining storytelling, a meditative sound centered around acoustic guitars, and the push and pull between cowboy solitude and the desire for close relationships. For most of North America, the former sentiment wins out. On “Rest Your Head on the State Line,” Graefe sings, “In times of need / I find my own reprieve echoing softly,” affirming his own independence; the three different versions of the all-instrumental “North America” suggest that words aren’t necessary to communicate feeling; and in “Place Me on a Rock,” he sings, “Leave me on my own / The reverie’s been shown.”
In that last song, though, the melody is subdued and slow, betraying some sadness as it unfolds patiently over acoustic guitar and the quiet glow of mellotron. Being alone, it seems to suggest, does not always live up to the romantic notions we ascribe to it. In “Call Me A Stone,” the artist longs for home as he talks to someone on speaker phone. “Boys” is also about communication, its Elliot Smith-like chorus repeating, “Please don’t speak and I’ll hear you.” This is a different side of the same American (and human, for that matter) coin: the need for the relationships that are at a distance.
The problem with fitting so neatly into the Americana tradition, though, is that occasionally, the songwriting in North America can cross the line into cliché. At times, the lyrics force a rhyme (“Put me in a box / And fasten all the locks / I won’t make a sound / Until I touch down”) or use too-familiar imagery (“Like a river, they run right through me” in “Boys,” and “I know my feeling has no ceiling” on “Blood Feather”).
But these moments are rare and easy to miss on an album that otherwise deals in beautiful subtlety. Exhibiting his training, Graefe excels at using the full range of what a guitar can do. He finger-picks quietly, eliciting a powerful bout of wistfulness; strums to make a full, lush sound; and with a soaring, screeching electric guitar, makes certain songs feel lofty and wonderfully off-kilter. At first glance a straightforward album, North America quickly reveals the twists and turns that unfold like the many roads on which it reflects. We should be glad, then, that those roads eventually led Graefe back.