Well it could rain for days, and then where would I be?

2009 is already shaping up to be a pretty great year for music. I had two highly anticipated albums for the first month. One was the new Bruce Springsteen, which isn’t terrible but mostly gets a big meh (review forthcoming, but I can tell you now it’ll be summed up as “what if he re-recorded Lucky Town with the E Street Band?”). The other was the new record from Vanessa Peters, who I discovered immediately after making my top albums of 2006 list – where she would have featured quite prominently.

Reviewing the last album, I called it “the record I’ve been waiting for Aimee Mann to make for years” and that description would fit Sweetheart, Keep Your Chin Up as well. However, this time around there’s a little bit more of a deliberately folk-country feel. In that respect, it might be more accurate to call it the record that I think Gram Parsons might have made if he had gotten the chance.

It opens on a slightly tremulous note, with the warm gentle waves of “Good News.” In those first moments you hear the doubt, the fear that inevitably comes tied with every belief. But soon it becomes clear that what you mistook for timidity is in fact a dusky sadness, hurt deeply but still unbowed. By the time the final chorus rolls around it’s clear that this is not a record about fear. Instead, it’s about standing firm, singing loud and clear into the dark, cold night – singing to all those who sail on past without even a glance.

It’s one mark of a great song that it can work on a number of different levels. And almost every song here does that. They work as allegory, as symbols for some of the grand concepts: love, fear, loss, friendship, fear. They work as literal short stories. They work as snapshots, bereft of all meaning except the pure joy in a single shared moment.

Through it all, war is a constant theme, as befits a record in a time when you sometimes struggle to remember just how long this state of affairs has lasted. But while war infuses the record, this is by no means an album about war. Instead, it’s a subtle backdrop to stories that range from the truly mundane to the universal. There are lives lost in the Twin Towers – or loves broken apart inside them. There are soldiers who leave in glory and lives torn apart. The second track “The War” deals with the concept most directly (even going so far as to offer the stark opening line: “planes keep on crashing”). And yet even here, you gain far more as you peel back the layers and realize that these first two tracks are actually pair: subtitled (The Siren Song) and (Odysseus’s Song) respectively. Suddenly, the camera pulls back and the metaphors blur into mythology.

At this point you’re primed for the completion of the trilogy with “The Next Big Bang (Penelope’s Song)” – the tale of the wife at home waiting for news from her husband long gone in the war. The way it all fits together, an entire human history filled with wars, each one declared heroic in its own time – and through all of it, the ones who stay on the side, those at home just wondering when it is all going to be over.

Other songs reference St. Anthony, Pegasus, Icarus, the wicked witch and more. But the quality of the music and the subtlety of the allusions means it never feels forced or distracting. Instead, you get a sense of these myths as they were meant to be experienced: in the down-to-earth and daily mixture of dreams and the material world.

Musically, as I said at the beginning, it dwells comfortably in that comfortable terrain of folk, country, and guitar-driven songs. But within that frame, plenty of different influences are given space to shine. There’s the jangly deconstruction (literally) of a failing relationship in “The Grammar of a Sinking Ship” which features mandolins that lope along in sheer joy and violins that dart and dive like fireflies on a summer night. There’s “Good News” and “Keep Your Chin Up” which feature slide guitars that ease themselves around you like the gentle embrace of an old, comfortable love. And “A Million Little Rocks” is the sort of song you’d imagine someone playing on the beach some late summer night – all full of delicately plucked notes an a deep ineffable sadness (the first verse concludes: “It would have been better to end there, cause at least I could say that I died loving you, doing nothing wrong, no one yet betrayed).

For the most part, it’s a record that feels intimate and close. But you’re also treated tracks like “Medals” and “Coming to Meet Me” which don’t shy away from a larger-than-life buildup. And “The War” is perfect slice of good old-fashioned verse-chorus-verse guitar pop.

And finally, there’s my favorite track “Drowning in Amsterdam” which combines almost every good element on the record: a convivial sound, an easy joyfulness, a casual embrace of anything and everything that may come rushing through our lives, a sly wink at both human ingenuity as well as the coming apocalypse.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes for great art. The more I consider it, the more I’m convinced that Kurt Vonnegut got it absolutely right:

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

I hope, then, it means something when I tell you that Sweetheart, Keep Your Chin Up makes me appreciate being alive.

Drowning in Amsterdam – Vanessa Peters
The War – Vanessa Peters