CMJ New Music Report - March 2012 - Tasting Grace

fly TOGEThER
bowerbirds reunites and steps into The Clearing
by dan JaCkson
Some questions are unpleasant. “I remember,
maybe in 2007, when we first started being
a band,” says Bowerbirds’ Phil Moore, “and we
had an interview with somebody—I forget who—
and they asked us, ‘What will the band be if you
two break up?’ And I was like, ‘It probably won’t.
I can’t really see it being a band at all.’”
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The annals of pop music are filled with great breakup records but not
many reconciliation albums. Sure, “Breaking up is hard to do,” as
the song goes, but calling it quits and then getting back together can
be much, much harder, and the complex emotional transactions and
personal concessions involved—forgiving each other, admitting one’s
own fears, learning to live with another person’s faults—aren’t exactly
the type of dramatic scenarios that lend themselves to pop songs,
even within the self-styled “literary” world of folk music. There’s a
reason Shoot Out The Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson’s famous
last album as a married couple, wasn’t followed by another record
titled Let’s Go Buy Some New Lights Cause We Shot The Old Ones
Out. Blood usually stays on the tracks.