Laura Kerry
The description of Ian Wayne’s EP At Home is brief and to the point. Besides listing his four collaborators and a small thank you, it says only, “All songs written and performed live by Ian Wayne in Park Slope, Brooklyn.” That one sentence seemingly provides little information about the album, but its brevity gives the work all the context it needs.
The first and second facts point to the same result: The album was recorded live by a single artist, and as a result, it is an intimate experience. From the beginning of At Home, when Wayne speaks gently into the microphone, “When I Clean Out The Sink, take one” (very impressive, if true), he invites us into the space he inhabits with only his guitar and his beautifully bare voice to keep him company. The EP is quiet and pared down but in a close and full way, giving the feeling that the listener sits beside Wayne in a small, dimly lit room.
Throughout At Home, starting both from the EP’s title and the nod to Park Slope in the intro, Wayne continues to situate his music in a sense of place. In the opener, “When I Clean Out The Sink,” he thinks about someone far away, but repeatedly returns to his own kitchen. Wayne sings, “When I clean out the sink / It is done thoughtfully / With my hands on the cup,” drawing out a small and domestic image. Tangible, specific references to settings like these emerge repeatedly—a Polish grocery in “People Walking By,” “public lawns and shopping marts” in “Perfect Strangers.” Wayne is a skilled world-builder, but his world never gets bigger than a room in an apartment or a few blocks of a Brooklyn neighborhood.
While his lyrics carve out this intimate setting, the guitar also establishes a grounded feeling of space. In the opener, his gentle but lush acoustic guitar marches slowly, circling around a few chords in the same quarter-note strumming pattern. The vocal melody occupies the first half of each measure, but the second half always returns to two beats on the lowest note in whatever chord he’s playing, producing the feeling that the song has a sturdy and palpable foundation. The same tightly repetitive structures in “People Walking By” and the beginning of “Perfect Strangers” lend the music solidity despite its sparseness.
Not all of At Home is so grounded, though. In “Curious Thing (Looking For Love),” a song slightly reminiscent of The Shins, Wayne gets into surreal territory. He sings, “Standing my pocket in my hand” and “We think we'll love the men that we become in old age when we all are young,” flipping his imagery. The music is also dreamy at times. In the final song, “Perfect Strangers,” Wayne fantasizes about strangers he sees. Less rigidly structured, the track floats and meanders like the thoughts it chronicles. When it escalates at the chorus, though, the song loses some of the intimacy that works so well elsewhere on the album. Instead of sounding quiet and close, it sounds a little thin.
At the end of “Perfect Strangers,” though, the song quiets down again. “I don’t know,” Wayne repeats more softly each time as he plucks his guitar gently. After we’ve lingered in the songwriter’s imagination, his sad, subdued doubt brings us back to earth where he exists without the love of the strangers he sees. Listening to all of At Home creates the same effect; after four songs that bring you into Wayne’s space, you might be surprised to find yourself back in your own apartment.