MOON UPON THE RICH AND POOR

Here we start from the present, from Nick Garrie’s life and creative maturity, and then we will move on to his youth, opposing the linearity standards in countless biographies and non-fiction music books. The Moon and the Village (2017) is Garrie’s most recent album, and only his third in the last fifty years, which is how much time he could have spent making music under his own name. Jennifer Kelly has written that this album is certainly not going to become legendary or fall into total obscurity as was the case with Garrie’s debut record; she says it is just a very good album by an artist who simply did not have time to make more records. And he has made three so far, as did the melancholic and romantic Nick Drake, anonymous in life and celebrated in death. However, Garrie has had incomparably more time than Drake ever did. There were music interpreters who drew superficial parallels between discographic destinies and artistic expressions of the two namesakes. Garrie himself will mention Drake in his concert stories between songs, although in a bitterly funny context when talking about the sinking of his debut album and evoking a painful memory of daily phoning his record company in Paris to ask where his record was and them answering that he only needed to go to their Champs-Élysées store where he would see his record in the window. The fact that he did find a record there by an artist called Nick, Nick Drake, would not help the disappointed nineteen-year-old man to easily become intimate with Drake’s almost majestic lyrical and musical work.

The Moon and the Village was not recorded by this saddened youth, but by the man who had been through a lot for most of his life. Devoid of youthful illusions and divested of the search for the holy grail of success for a long time, but still always open to the possibility of little miracles. The moon equally shines down upon the rich and poor – which is a lyrical negative of the more famous saying that the sun shines down upon the virtuous and sinful – is a lyric which reveals Garrie’s universal understanding of life rules and his forgiving acceptance and reconciliation of extremes. The bitterness of everyday life and the awareness of transience are tastefully combined with the beauty and joy of existence itself, and the songs are reflexive, warm and permeated with experience. Garrie is a natural storyteller: the first song, Lois’ Diary introduces a short first-person narrative about an Englishman who falls in love with an American woman, after he finds her personal diary by accident. The couple gets a daughter, but the father does not manage to build a good relationship with her, and finally, the couple’s love dies away because things do not always turn out the way we hope for. The title song tells a more common story based on the same insight, about an elderly lady who realizes, after looking at her sleeping old husband, that something went wrong in her unexciting life a long time ago, but that it is far too late for anything to change. Bacardi Samuel brings us a narrative about a drunken fool who will never get better. All these life stories can be taken symbolically as music from a broken violin, which is the title of the fourth song on the album: Music from a Broken Violin. Garrie’s sympathy for losers defeated by an unfortunate set of circumstances or a wrong choice in life is completely understandable considering his own biography. He likes to work the topic of the defeated, without ever being too emphatic, or pathetic, choosing instead the approach of a compassionate drawer who discreetly watches things from aside and makes not an ordinary sketch, but a memorable one. That is why the arrangements are bare, simple, minimalistically atmospheric, serving the song in the form of a draft – an unpretentious but unforgettable music image which has a lot more to say.

Nick Garrie is a heartfelt author. His humanity and compassion lend a deep tone to his every song, which is especially true for My Dear One, this magical dedication to the dignity and beauty of aging that Garrie wrote, having found inspiration in rest homes where he mostly performed in the last few years. One of Garrie’s genuine gifts is creating exquisite singable melodies which voluntarily stay in your head and are easily played later in the memory of the listener – only true virtuosos of pop music have such talent. After the song Deeper Tones of Blue from the beginning of this story, My Dear One was the tune I most often evoked, the song which my friend and musical blood brother Milan recognized as the most precious one at Garrie’s concert in Novi Sad. There is another song on this album which has the same foundation of humanity and virtuousness and is equally memorable: I’m on Your Side, a friendly message as protection from all evils which shall come and go. Such two songs cannot be crafted in youth. They arise from the inspiration which is not available at the dawn of someone’s creative journey, but can only be found in its sunset, in its dusk hour. The whole sum of life’s failures and successes, awareness that neither the former nor the latter exist and that everything (seemingly good and apparently bad) will once be gone, participation in the existence as the only acceptable sense of living, and reconciliation with yourself in others and with others in yourself – these are all elements of the best songs from Garrie’s third album. In Early Morning in the Garden you feel the gentle mentoring aura of Leonard Cohen, a refined artist of a similar habitus with almost identical insights and interests but of worldwide fame, who took Garrie under his wing on a joint tour in Spain in the eighties and had a crucial influence on this insecure comeback musician not to give up again. So, once the influence of the great Canadian poet with the guitar is recognized, the story of Nick Garrie gets welcoming tones of the eternal myth of a cultural hero who lives through many troubles on his adventurous journey and is from time to time lent a helping hand by some wizard sent out by heavenly forces interested in the hero successfully completing his mission. With its unpretentious form and discreetness and simplicity of shapes (Got You on My Mind consists only of Garrie’s voice and the accompanying harp), The Moon and the Village is a work which somewhat masks its considerable true value and greatness. Obvious in the twenty seven minutes of music that make up this album. The single You, which belongs to the same body of songs but is not on this record, gently evokes the other giant songwriter of today: Bob Dylan. Together, they comprise half an hour of music whose creation took a very long life journey. In the obviousness of the stark contrast between big and small, invaluable and ordinary, essential content and unpretentiously built forms, in the collision of Garrie’s probably already customary commentary at concerts, about nobody in the world really listening to him and about love his music brings out in people all over this planet, there lies the answer to the mystery of his organic magnetism and a true measure of the value of his art. Even if we had not previously met the witched and later gradually blessed Stanislas, The Moon and the Village would be a testimony to the exceptional talent of a man who was one step away from a meteoric rise to success in his youth, but later had to accept a completely different tempo and rhythm, maybe best illustrated by that gentle instrumental minuet which concludes this tactful album.    

Its balanced and discreet production is the work of Gary Olson and Kyle Forester, a duo from the Brooklyn-based group The Ladybug Transistor, and the songs were recorded in the New York studio and creative shelter of the artistic collective Elephant 6, which connects different American bands and musicians who share a passion for the sixties pop music. The choice was understandable considering Garrie’s pedigree of a creatively brilliant but commercially completely buried classic of the sixties, the decade which defined modern music.  

 

Excerpt taken from Legend of a Grounded Dreamer (a story about Nick Garrie, a forgotten genius of pop music)

Translated by Igor Cvijanović