“You don’t have to die,” Segarra sings, their timbre plaintive and urgent but knowing and confident on “Alibi” – the first track on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sublime record The Past is Still Alive from last year – open strings ringing on an acoustic guitar over roundy left-hand piano chords. “If you don’t want to die”, the line continues, a lead guitar a little trembly, a pedal-steely organ somewhere back there too, the arrangement solidly Americana but already giving so much more. “You can take it all back / In the nick of time”: the song is giving love by giving time. Giving time by creating it. Creating it for someone. These two have a history – shared secrets, track marks, New York City, “I love you very much / And all that other stuff.”
I started thinking about Keats (after a few dozen listens) in connection to the nest line – “Thawing out my heart like meat” – thinking probably, for reasons that didn’t quite make sense at first, about Keats’s “burning forehead” and “parching tongue” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the “cold pastoral” of the vase cannot thaw like “all breathing human passion” can. Segarra: “Baby, help me understand.”
A heart that thaws is a heart that changes in time. On the next song, “Buffalo,” Segarra uses a related simile, worrying that they and their addressee will “disappear like the melting snow.” (Are those field recordings of birds back there in the mix? Or fingers squeaking on guitar strings?) It’s the inevitability of snow melting that haunts this lilting dobro-flecked ballad (listen to the fried lilt in how Segarra sings “pueblo”). In our historical moment, as this song knows, the melting snow reminds us of our slow but inevitable extinction. Will love – “our time” – also go? The song wonders: what about beauty? Will love and beauty we know and feel die off as the woolly mammoth did, Segarra asks, or the dodo, the Mariana fruit bats, the bridled white-eye, or Bachman’s warbler? How will the beauty of the song of birds – yes, those must be recorded birds in the mix – survive? With concerns like Segarra’s, Keats explored these questions in “Ode to a Nightingale”: for Keats, as it seems for Segarra, beauty and love are life – and as they fade, so do we. “No hungry generations tread thee down,” Keats writes to the nightingale, thinking not of the living creature (the actual birds would be subject to endangerment and extinction as the song’s warbler is) itself but of all the moments of beauty – past and present, “ancient days” as well as “this passing night” – the birdsong in the poem stands for. Eileen Myles: “maybe the / words are / the birds.”
The recorded birds in the mix of “Buffalo” (you can especially hear them at the start and the end of the track – best to try vinyl or CD or at least lossless streaming) are the song’s hint at an answer to its question of whether or not beauty will go the way of the dodo. There can be beauty and magic in what is recorded: as the song describes analogously in the second verse, Sky Redhawk camped out in Minnesota with a “recorder” to capture “the rumble of the big stampede / That one day magically appeared.” The birds, this song, the buffalo: “for I will fly to thee” (Keats); “And I want us to be like that / Running wild and running free” (Segarra). Segarra and Keats seem to hear beauty similarly – in darkness, beneath the stars, unable to see or to feel their feet, their connection with earth and mortality. Keats: “tender is the night, / And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, / Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays”; “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.” Segarra, in one of the record’s most beautiful verses, as the instrumentation fades for a few beats: “Our footsteps fall in shadows, / Treading light down the canyon trail, / And the sun is barely rising, / And the stars like a wedding veil.” As this plaintive ballad fades, we hear the songs of birds again. Myles: “the dove’s / song is / graceful / layered / hey that’s maybe / where poetry / came from.”
After “Hawkmoon” – a driving, detailed, and poignant coming-of-age story (buses, backpacks, buck knifes, afternoon fifths, violence) – we hear the aching “Colossus of Roads,” eight verses and then an outro. The song references two artists by name, Eileen Myles and artist and photographer buZ blur, and takes its title from one of blur’s boxcar characters. Blur’s title itself must be a pun on the Colossus of Rhodes, wonder of the ancient world, a memorial now in ruins like the statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a “colossal wreck” amid “the lone and level sands” because everything physical is subject to decay, endangerment, extinction. Segarra’s “Colossus” is about the outsized power of a memory of love and desire: “you will live forever / as this bombshell in my mind.” Neither the verse-only structure nor the chord progression itself really gives the feel of resolving, as the memory remains alive and “dangerous” in the “bomb shelter of my featherbed.” The next song, “Snake Plant (The Past is Still Alive),” is a related exploration of memory rendered in exquisitely opaque but compelling detail: “Campfire on the superfund site / Garbage island fucking in the moonlight / I play my song for the barrel of freaks / And we go shoplifting when it’s time to eat,” Segarra sings at the moment we feel the song turn exaltant.
The momentum at the end of “Snake Plant” carries over to the next track, the thumping “Vetiver,” the song that contains the album’s title phrase. I had to look up what vetiver is: a species of tropical bunch grass native to India. The song opens “And the rocks and the stones and the vetiver” – and I’m thinking, is this an allusion to Wordsworth’s “rocks and stones and trees”? The answer, it seems, is yes, as later in the song Segarra calls back that phrase, reminding us that they’ve been reading poetry:
So I return to the rocks and stones,
Depend on the books and poems,
Return to the rocks and stones,
Return to the rocks,
Return to the rocks.
The line in Wordsworth is from an untitled poem is the group of poems usually referred to as the Lucy Poems; it is known by its first line, “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Among other things the poems grieve the death of a mysterious figure named Lucy: in the one we’re talking about here, Lucy is “rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees.” In other words, Wordsworth is writing about the memory of Lucy and how it may be alive (rolled round) with the rocks, stones, and trees. The memory in “Vetiver” lives in the singer’s head with the rocks and stones of the poems, as “Vetiver” concludes: “Lately I’ve been waiting for the day, / You’re the melody that lives inside my head. / I wish I could sanctify my mind / Why am I so heavy all the time?”
I have to stop myself from bringing Keats back up here as a fellow-traveler when I think about that last verse in “Vetiver” – the melody in one’s head, of course, as “heard melodies are sweet; but those unheard / Are sweeter,” et cetera, or when I think about the “city forgotten” in the album’s last song, the anthemic “Ogallala,” the forgotten city reminding me of the hauntingly empty town on Keats’s urn. But I do think that Keats, Myles, Wordsworth, and Shelley, among others, are true companions to this stunning album. On that closing track Segarra suggests this, at least to my mind:
Meet me back
In a San Francisco bookstore.
Down the stairs,
In the poetry aisle
We’ll get lost in a city forgotten.
That spot right there – the poetry aisle, with your person – surely literally the only place to be when it is time, as the song goes, “to watch the world burn.” That is truth; that is beauty.