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The anger that flashes in "Fenario" and fuels "Waist Deep" peaks there, though. The middle of the album is a series of snapshots, some simple, others that linger and deepen their subjects. "Hazel's House" is one of the most direct songs I've ever heard, an uncomplicated ode to a woman whose crumb cake and attention are warm blankets of comfort and welcome. However, while the simplicity of "Hazel's House" is something to wrap yourself up in, I found that "The Island" errs a bit too much on the plain side. I suppose the song is about our inability to control nature, the fact that despite our super-developed resort culture, the cliffs erode and the ocean has its way. An interesting point about impermanence, but too platitudinous for Shindell at his best. The song leaves us without a lingering image, like Hazel waiting for you as you climb her front steps.
Shindell returns to his greatest strength in "Che Guevara T-Shirt," in which he manages to tell a very large storyabout a stowaway coming to Americain a very small way, by focusing on how a photo of a true love can both reassure and terrify. I heard Shindell perform this song, which is a bit unusual in form. The song has no chorusinstead, it's an ever-building series of verses that give the impression of a large ship slicing through the ocean with increasing speed.
One of Shindell's most noted earlier songs, "Fishing," crafted a story about an immigration officer interrogating and manipulating an illegal immigrant, threatening deportation if the man does not divulge information about where other family members are hiding. Listening to the end of "Che Guevara T-Shirt," I felt the chill of "Fishing" haunt this new character as he too faces an interrogator brimming with vague threat. It's another testament to the fullness of Shindell's storytelling.
Shindell's previous albums have shown his fondness for recurring themes, most notably trucking, and Vuelta is no exception. There are two "bird songs" on the album that raise listeners' eyes upward. "There Goes Mavis" is a quaint and sweet story about a little girl at the beach who wants to see her orange canary Mavis fly free from her cage. The story is doubly powerful, because it is told from the perspective of a parent who is building a sandcastle with his or her sons while Mavis' drama unfolds around them. The family tends busily to the castle, and to their own lives, oblivious to anyone else's problems until Mavis literally lands on their driftwood flagpole.
The song follows the story as a crowd gathers and the little girl struggles against her mother's efforts to re-cage Mavis. The mother is no doubt right to say that the bird would not survive in the wild. But isn't risky freedom better than safe imprisonment? Summarized baldly in this way, the scenario sounds bathetic, yet in Shindell's hands it is charming. The song offers no lyric judgment of whether Mavis chose well or poorly, only channels the narrator's observation, "there goes Mavis." But the music tells a different story, with tension resolving as the bird flies off "on the long horizon" into a soaring yet still fragile phrase.
The other bird song, "So Says the Whipporwill," also takes up images of freedom from imprisonment, whether literal or figurative. When I interviewed Shindell a while back, he said that the song was a tribute to his friend, folk legend Dave Carter, who died of a heart attack at age 49 in the summer of 2002. (Carter's widow, Tracy Grammer, plays violin on the track.) The song talks about suddennessthe line "The change could happen any day" opens each versebut it also talks about the courage required to actually make a change, the leap of faith we all need to take in order to live each day to the fullest.
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