John Darnielle sings most of “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” in falsetto. “Falsetto” is one of those terms like “hip-hop” or “polyamory”; ask ten people to define it and you’ll hear ten definitions, all stated with total confidence. I’m not interested in trying to nail it down, or in speaking with any kind of global authority. I’m going to use the term here to mean anything that isn’t chest voice. It’s high up, it sounds different, don’t overthink it.
Darnielle had sung in falsetto on prior albums, but never like this. Never so close-mic’d, in such high fidelity, and for such an extended period of time. The studio production reveals the nuances of his vocal performance in greater detail than would have been possible during his lo-fi era. You can really hear the breath, the texture of his throat as the air moves through it.
Darnielle has never sounded like a trained vocalist, and his voice can be divisive, but on previous records he does usually sound confident, often in triumph or defiance or some mingling of the two. He usually sounds like he is in fuller control of what he’s doing, his intonation steadier, his tone more predictable. For the first time here, he sounds fragile.
* * *
I had a friend in college who was primarily a fan of Darnielle’s early work. She told me that when she first heard his studio-recorded falsetto, she thought, “This guy can’t help get me through high school.” At the time I assumed she meant it sounded too polished, that she couldn’t relate to him as a fellow underdog when he sounded that pretty. Now I wonder if it was almost the opposite. Did she need a scrappy champion, and recoil when she found someone as small and wounded as she was?
* * *
It is brave to be fragile. The vocal vulnerability suits the unprecedented lyrical vulnerability of The Sunset Tree. There may have been autobiographical songs scattered throughout his previous output, but those songs never really stuck out from his work as a weaver of yarns. In conversation with Marc Maron, he describes writing these songs as “terrifying,” and says, “In many ways, that’s the first Mountain Goats album.” Even We Shall All Be Healed, which he describes as autobiographical, feels of a piece with his storytelling mode. It feels like finding a box of Polaroids that once belonged to a stranger. The Sunset Tree feels a little closer to reading your friend’s diary. Or, on “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones,” like having secrets whispered in your ear.
* * *
I first started experimenting with my own falsetto in high school, singing along with Radiohead in the car. In college, I began utilizing it in my own songs. I didn’t really start singing quietly until that period. The first time I sang quietly into a good microphone and heard my voice recorded by someone who knew what they were doing, it was an alien experience to me. I was so used to encountering my voice as a thing of heft and force and penetrating power. Hearing myself in an intimate whisper was both exhilarating and frightening.
* * *
Dinu Lipatti died young. He left behind a small body of compositions, and a small body of recordings as a pianist. It’s hard to parse out exactly what his name means in the context of this song. Perhaps a signifier of impermanence? Of the importance of acting while action is available to you? Of the uneasy position youthful passion holds within the ungraspable scope of history? I’m not interested in trying to nail it down, but it’s got to have something to do with death.
* * *
It’s hard sometimes to create things and not think about their potential to outpace and outlive you. My first solo album was recorded in 2020. I wanted to get a bunch of raw feelings out into the world without getting in my own way, wanted a process that wouldn’t allow me to obsess or strive for perfection. So I turned to cassette tape. I used a good tape machine and two good microphones instead of Darnielle’s old internal-mic-of-the-boom-box method, but I recorded voice and guitar simultaneously and I didn’t punch in anywhere, edit anything, or know what I was doing. The early Mountain Goats recordings were very much on my mind, and I likely wouldn’t have done it without their example to embolden me.
* * *
The night before I began recording, I rewatched Errol Morris’s The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography in an almost ritualistic attempt to influence my own mindset going into the project. Dorfman spent most of her career working primarily with the massive Polaroid Land 20×24 camera, which produces large-format pictures with an instant printing method very much like that of the more familiar handheld Polaroids. There was a clear kinship between her process and what I was attempting, turning control over in the moment of creation to an analog machine that would immediately produce a physical object with severely limited possibilities for post-hoc alteration. But in the documentary, her thoughts on medium and craft are inseparable from her thoughts on impermanence and death. Gazing at a portrait of her friend Allen Ginsberg, she says, “Maybe that’s when photographs have their ultimate meaning, is when the person dies.”
She doesn’t claim to embrace impermanence. I’m not sure I really believe anyone can look at that void unblinking. She describes personal losses and the thought of her own death as “horrible,” and when asked about the perishability of her prints she says, “I try not to think about it.” But she also seems capable of moving through or around those feelings with enviable grace, like there is a certain kind of acceptance in her non-acceptance. It’s tempting to think of cameras as things that capture and preserve, but Dorfman doesn’t believe photographs hold the truth of a moment. “It doesn’t matter how much you try to nail down the now, the now is racing beyond you.”
* * *
There’s a snippet of an old home movie. Dorfman is sitting with her young son, Isaac. She turns to the camera and says to the child, “Let’s wave to the future.” The clip was decades old when it was used in the documentary. Dorfman died four years later, five months before I rewatched the film and tried in my own way to nail down the now.
* * *
There were a few years where my falsetto got much worse. My cassette tape recording sessions fell during those years. What had once been piercing and strong became breathy and loose. I had to make my peace with the world hearing a version of my falsetto that, at the time, made me feel something approaching dysphoria. The sound was a reminder of the irretrievability of the years, of my own recklessness and stupidity in treating my voice unkindly, scream-singing it ragged on purpose, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much. It was a reminder of my own mortality. The voice is not an object, but it is made of objects. Meat and air. Our meat decays, gets injured, and dies. All air will eventually leave us. Our bones survive years beyond our final breath. Our meat does not.
I had to stop thinking like this could be the only piece of me with the potential to last a century, and instead think like I was simply waving to the future.
* * *
My falsetto has improved again since recording that album. I drink less and I’ve been off cigarettes for a few years. I’ve spent long, difficult hours negotiating with my own body to find the techniques that serve me best at this phase of life. If I hold you like this, how will you sing for me? If I pull you or tilt you just so? My falsetto is not exactly as it once was, but it is once again a point of pride, showcased at every opportunity. This won’t last. I’ve also taken on some scarring on my vocal cords from a case of COVID, so I have different issues now. And I am more conscious than ever that everything about my voice is temporary. When I sing for the last time, my voice will have more and different flaws than it does now. I can only hope it will also have different expressive virtues. Either way, there probably won’t be a microphone present, and my voice won’t leave a skeleton.
* * *
I used to sing opera. The classical music world is cruel. Darnielle’s quavering, uncertain falsetto feels especially poignant to me when wrapped around the name of someone who never quite broke into the canon. Lipatti’s compositions are largely seen as living in the shadow of their influences, and while he was widely respected as a pianist in his time, even the best classical performers just don’t tend to get remembered the way the most beloved composers do. Casual listeners will usually turn to newer recordings with less noise, crisper detail, deeper low end. Things that sound more Sunset Tree and less Zopilote Machine.
Practitioners of a given craft are somewhat more likely to look backward, but as much as the establishment likes to pretend otherwise, fashions are fickle and unbeholden to history. Look into the history of aria transposition, cadenzas, or glissandi—pull off the “tradition” mask, and you’ll find a very young dogma. A performer who was revered in their time may now be seen as lacking in taste or finesse. Sopranos today will gush about the emotive brilliance of Maria Callas, but are almost always quick to throw in a disparaging word about her technique.
I reach for the name “Callas” because you may have heard it. How many of us knew “Lipatti” before this song brought it to us? I didn’t. I’ve gotten some enjoyment from his compositions and recordings since, but experienced nothing like the resonance or connection he likely hoped for before his meat failed him.
* * *
I once asked a voice teacher for tips on singing while in suboptimal health. The classical music world is cruel. I’ve had to perform with everything from allergies to pneumonia. My teacher’s material advice was just to lean even harder on the technique I already knew. But before he got to that: “First of all, you sing with the voice you have.”
Years passed before I realized the full aphoristic spiritual power there. I doubt he even remembers saying it. Sing with the voice you have.
* * *
John Darnielle has been singing for a long time. He sounds different on his most recent records than on his earliest, but to my ear it sounds like he just sings in a wider variety of ways, not like he’s lost ground. It’s easy to hear him without thinking about the aging, injured meat that makes the sounds. But I’d bet anything that his voice feels different to use, that he’s aware of the subtle changes in his tone over time in a way no one living outside his body could ever be.
* * *
The relationship sketched in “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” seems youthful and imperfect. It sounds like there is some kinship, but also a fundamental gap in understanding. I don’t love the sound of the lines about money. The connection probably doesn’t have the stuff to last. But then again, Darnielle seems to ask, what does?
* * *
What will they do with his bones when he’s gone? Will anyone sing about mine?
This essay is an excerpt from Broad Sound Spotlights: The Sunset Tree at 20, available at Amazon and BroadSoundStore.com
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