SOUNDTRACK: GRUFF RHYS–American Interior (2013).
Gruff Rhys was (is?) the singer and composer in Super Furry Animals, a fantastic indie-pop band from Wales. After several years with SFA and several solo albums, Gruff decided to do something a little different. Actually, everything he does is a little different, as this quote from The Guardian explains:
“The touring musician can feel like the puppet of consumer forces,” he writes, bemoaning the way that “cities have now been renamed ‘markets’ and entire countries downgraded to ‘territories'”. So, over the last five or so years, he has come up with the idea of “investigative touring”: combining the standard one-show-a‑night ritual with creative fieldwork. In 2009, he went to Patagonia to trace the roots of a disgraced relative called Dafydd Jones, and the Welsh diaspora in South America more generally, and played a series of solo concerts, as well as making a film titled Separado!. Now, Rhys has reprised the same approach to tell another story, and poured the results into four creations: an album, another film, an ambitious app, and this book – all titled American Interior, and based on the brief life of John Evans: another far-flung relative of the singer, who left Wales to travel to North America in the early 1790s.
So yes, there’s a film and a book and this CD. This album is a delightful blend of acoustic and electronic pop and folk. Rhys’ voice is wonderfully subdued and with his Welsh accent coming in from time to time, it makes everything he sings somehow feel warm and safe (even when it’s not). Rhys creates songs that sound like they came from the 1970s (but better), but he also explores all kinds of sonic textures–folk songs, rocking songs, dancing song, even songs in Welsh.
“American Exterior” is a 30 second intro with 8-bit sounds and the repeated “American Interior” until the piano and drum-based (from Kliph Scurlock) “American Interior” begins. It’s a catchy song with the repeated (and harmonized) titular refrain after each line and it’s a great introduction to the vibe of the record. It’s followed by the super catchy stomping “100 Unread Messages” which just rocks along with a great chorus. You can see Gruff “composing” the lyrics to this in the book.
“The Whether (Or Not)” introduces some electronic elements to this song. It’s basically a great pop song with splashes of keys and some cool stabs of acoustic guitar. “The Last Conquistador” and “The Lost Tribes” are gentler synthy songs, as many of these are. “Liberty (Is Where We’ll Be)” returns to the acoustic sound with some really beautiful piano.
“Allweddellau Allweddol” (English translation: Key Keyboards) is the only all-Welsh song on the record and it romps and stomps and is as much fun as that title suggests it would be. There’s even a children’s choir singing on it (maybe?).
“The Swamp” is a simple electronics and drumming pattern which leaps right into “Iolo” one of the most fun songs on the record. It’s a nod to the Welsh poet who inspired but backed out of Evans’ expedition at the last-minute but also a rollicking good time with the chanted “yoloyoloyoloyolo” and great tribal drums from Kliph.
The end of the album slows things down with “Walk Into the Wilderness” a slow aching ballad and the final two animal-related songs. “Year of the Dog” is kind of a mellow opus when it is joined by the instrumental coda “Tiger’s Tale.” Both songs feature goregous pedal steel guitar from Maggie Bjorklund.
Gruff Rhys is an amazing songwriter. He could write the history of an obscure Welshman and still get great catchy songs out of it. And that’s exactly what he’s done here.
[READ: December 2018] American Interior
How to explain this book?
I’ll start by saying that I loved it. I was delighted by Rhys’ experiences and, by the end, I was genuinely disappointed to read that Evans’ trip didn’t pan out (even though I knew it didn’t). The only compliant I have about the book is that I wish he had given a pronunciation guide for all of the welsh words in there, because I can’t even imagine how you say things like Ieuan Ab Ifan or Gwredog Uchaf or Dafydd Ddu Eryri (which is helpfully translated as Black David of Snowdonia, but not given a pronunciation guide). But what about the contents?
The subtitle gives a pretty good explanation but barely covers the half of it.
Here’s a summary from The Guardian to whet one’s appetite for Rhys himself and for what he’s on about here:
[John] Evans was a farmhand and weaver from Waunfawr on the edge of Snowdonia, who was in pursuit of something fantastical: a supposed tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans said to live at the top of the Missouri river, who were reckoned to owe their existence to the mythical Prince Madog, a native of Gwynedd who folklore claimed had successfully sailed to the New World in 1170. In 1580, this story was hyped up by Elizabeth I’s court mathematician and occultist John Dee (born of Welsh parents), in an attempt to contest the Spanish claim to American territory. Two centuries later, with the opening of new frontiers, talk of a tribe called the Madogwys and “forts deemed to be of Welsh origin” began to swirl anew around Wales and North America, and became tangled up in the revolutionary fervour of the time, along with a radical Welsh spirit partly founded in nonconformist Christianity.
All this was moulded into a proposal made by a self-styled druid named Iolo Morganwg (“a genius”, but “also a fraud of the highest order”, says Rhys), who “called for the Americans, in the light of Madog’s legacy, to present the Welsh with their own tract of land in the new country of the free, so that the Welsh could leave their condemned royalist homeland”. Morganwg stayed put in Cowbridge, near Cardiff (the site of his “radical grocery” shop is now occupied by a branch of Costa Coffee), but Evans was inspired by his visions, and eventually set sail.
Rhys goes on a “journey of verification”, following Evans’s route from Baltimore, through such cities as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, and then up the Missouri river to the ancestral home of the Mandan tribe of Native Americans, who had been rumoured to be the Welsh-speakers of myth, and among whom Evans lived, in territory argued over by the British and Spanish. Along the way, he does solo performances built around music and a PowerPoint-assisted talk about Evans’s story, keeps appointments with historians, and also tries to glimpse the America that Evans found through the cracks in a landscape of diners, what some people call “campgrounds”, and Native American reservations.
The Guardian’s review also talks about why the book works: (more…)
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Last year my daughter and I really enjoyed the Crawlers show that we went to.
