Dear Nora: human futures
Dear Nora’s human futures (released 10/28/22, Orindal Records)
The title track of human futures announces its intention straightaway: “reminiscing on days gone by…while the clock just keeps on running out.” Dear Nora’s latest LP is an album about what it means to be a human being who carries along the baggage of their life like a hermit crab carries its shell. It’s not that the protagonists described in human futures are especially nostalgic. It’s more that Dear Nora’s Katy Davidson finds different ways to describe in each song how bringing our past along with us is a sweet and regretful necessity for living life. The hermit crab that abandoned its shell wouldn’t get very far.
The leadoff track “scrolls of doom” begins with a quiet trope of spare keys that suggests you’re being teed up for a massive bass drop or wall of synths á la Matt & Kim. The drop never comes. Not in this song, not in the entire album. There are no walls of synths, spiraling solos, or extended dance mix codas. Dear Nora’s human futures is an incredibly reserved album, eschewing the cheap tricks of transition dynamics (volume and tempo) for a disciplined songwriting that does a whole lot more with a whole lot less. You have to have had the experience of composing music yourself to fully appreciate how much low hanging musical fruit Dear Nora lets pass them because it wasn’t right for the song. The result is a record that is compelling and totally unburdened of any effort to rocket the listener’s ear around the room like a cat chasing the red eye of a laser pointer.
Davidson delights with an old-fashioned storyteller in “sedona,” a song that zooms in on one life lived for seventy or more trips around the son. This genre of song can be canon (Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”), or cheesy (Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”), or just silly fun (The Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”). Dear Nora follows the travails of a young girl, then a middle-aged woman, finally a senior who compares the ebb and flow of her days to the ebb and flow of a creek in Sedona.
There’s a wistfulness in the remark – a sadness. Not because she regrets the choices made along the way, but rather because she knows her time for making any choices at all is quickly coming to a conclusion. It’s the coldest realization of old age: that regret experienced in youth and middle-age is a luxury for those who still have time left for dreaming about what they might be. The protagonist in “sedona” ends up as we all do – thankful to be…at all. It’s a heavy theme. Dear Nora sidesteps outright morbidity with pert key strokes and repeated refrains that provide the comfort of familiarity and touch of levity.
The track “flowers fading” brings a bouncy, down tempo groove and “slice of life” observational lyrics. Shades of Suzanne Vega in the deft portraiture put to a catchy beat. You expect the song to attain, or at least strive for, some type of climax. None is forthcoming, and the song comes to an end like a poem you thought was a sonnet but turned out to be a haiku. Instead of striving for moony insights, the song observes the mundane and sings praises to the mundane. Blessings.
The track “mothers and daughters” explores Katy Davidson’s voice in its choral possibilities. In the song Davidson meditates on the relationship between mothers and daughters. She takes the long view, retrojecting the relationship from sentient human beings (now, presumably) to our evolutionary origin as crustaceans (way back when). Did we really evolve from crustaceans? Sure, basically.
Dear NoraThe more important point is that the defining moments of the relationship – birthing, caring, rearing – were in place since a time immemorial. That emotional, not intellectual, formation is what swims beneath the surface of these deep family bonds. Which is why self-aware hairless apes still find the meaning of these relationships so hard to put into words. Which is why these bonds make us so happy when they go right, not requiring any rational justification or explanation. Which is why it hurts so badly when the bonds go wrong. Davidson sings a chorus with a choir of her own vocal tracks, finding in that strange multiplicity, both self and other, a little bit of the strangeness of familial identity.
It would be a mistake to wring a pat message from an album like human futures, which takes such pains to avoid musical, emotional, and intellectual postures. True enough, there’s a sadness in the general mood that tempts a listener to frame what they’re hearing in terms of a pessimism, whether it's directed at the outside world (the takedown of tech overlords in “scrolls of doom”) or the inner self (the introspective critique in “flag (into the fray)”). “Look what I, you, he/she/it, we, they have become!” But to intellectualize the emotion into a full-fledged thought, never mind a thesis, seems to betray the primitive depths that Dear Nora have dug up.
The sadness is the sadness of the hermit crab whose shell gets heavier even as it has less life to live.
The sadness is the sadness of the human being who can’t let go of the past without giving up the future.
But the song about the sadness is joy, the quiet exhilaration of lifting ourselves up out of temporary predicaments to see life from a less mutable vantage point. That Dear Nora can find its way, once in a while, to a peak of emotional transcendence is a blessing. That human futures wrapped up twelve neat packages to deliver this transcendence, ready for shipping to the listener, is a gift. Accept the joy. Accept the blessing. You’ll have to pay for the gift, though, but it’s worth it.
Super-stripped down indie pop is at work in Dear Nora’s LP human futures.